Reading Van Rijn

See The Early Van Rijn Stories II.

If we read books, not magazines, and if, living in Britain, we saw neither Ace Books' War Of The Wing-Men nor the same publisher's Un-Man And Other Novellas, then the first van Rijn story that we read was "Hiding Place," to be followed immediately by "Territory" and "The Master Key" since these three stories comprise Trader To The Stars. My Panther Books paperback edition of Trader... was reprinted in 1975 but I remember neither when I bought it nor whether I had previously read the book elsewhere. I have since acquired most of the volumes mentioned in the previous post, the two exceptions being The Man Who Counts as a single-volume novel and the three-volume edition of the Earth Book.

The "Le Matelot" introduction to "Hiding Place" differentiates Technic civilization from both Classical and Western civilizations but in no way intimates that we are beginning to read a history of Technic civilization. This new "civilization" begins in "The Saturn Game," (ASF, February, 1981) and ends when the Terran Empire falls. Thus, post-Imperial civilizations are also, in this sense, post-Technic although not post-technological. Although readers of Trader... had as yet no way of knowing that they were beginning to read a future history, this was known at the time because the linking story, "The Plague of Masters," had been published in Fantastic, December, 1960-January, 1961.