In their Man-Kzin Wars trilogy, Jerry Pournelle and SM Sterling adapt not only Ulf Markham but also the Nordbo family from Poul Anderson's MKW trilogy. If we have read the Man-Kzin Wars volumes in order of publication or if, being Poul Anderson fans, we have read Anderson's contributions before anyone else's, then we already know much of what will happen to Markham and to the Nordbos before we read of these characters in installments written by Pournelle and Stirling. The restrictions of continuity focus creativity. Characterization must be kept consistent and anyone who is going to be alive later cannot be killed earlier. However, creative writers can exercise enormous freedom within established continuities although I get the impression that the Dune series was prolonged purely for the purpose of publishing more books with the word Dune in their titles.
It will be a different reading experience if and when the MKW series is repackaged in chronological order of fictitious events as was done with Anderson's History of Technic Civilization - although I still like the original Technic History reading order, beginning with van Rijn, not even with his earliest installments, then filling in earlier events in later volumes.
Trader To The Stars begins "The world's great age begins anew..." and Mirkheim concludes with the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League so that the opening four volumes, these two with The Trouble Twisters and Satan's World between them, form a complete tetralogy which is a good introduction to a future history series, raising questions, answered later, about what had happened earlier and what would happen after the League.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, I can see how even the rigid constraints of writing in a multi-author shared world time line doesn't have to prevent good writers from being creative and imaginative. Writers like Anderson, Ing, Pournelle, Stirling, etc., make it LOOK so easy--and I know it's NOT!
Ad astra! Sean
Playing in someone else's sandbox can be fun -- not as a staple diet, though.
Mixed metaphors there: we don't want to eat sand!
(The fascist jackboot has been thrown into the melting pot.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Mixed metaphors can be fun and amusing! But, alas, that bit about the fascist jackboot is all too apt in the US just now, in these days of BLM riots and hysterically bullying leftists cowing and intimidating all who might oppose them.
Ad astra! Sean
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