adapted Star Trek scripts as prose short stories;
wrote the first Star Trek novel albeit one that became retroactively non-canonical unless, unbeknownst to me, some other writer has "saved the appearances" by explaining how the Klingon Empire was revived after Blish had brought it to an abrupt end.
It is a long way from Blish's Star Trek novel to Larry Niven's animated Star Trek episode to MKW stories by Poul Anderson and others yet a tenuous thread links these two (or more) alternative future histories in their respective franchise universes.
TV series are multi-authored so why not also some prose sf? Franchising works with MKW but I would not like to see similar treatment of Anderson's Flandry period. In fact, I thought that the two Technic History stories in Multiverse seemed inauthentic but maybe I ought to reread and discuss them further?
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree in not finding the three "Technic" contributions to MULTIVERSE always very satisfactory. But of those three stories I thought Raymond E. Feist's "A Candle" to be truest to the spirit and background of Anderson's Technic History. And I liked what Feist wrote in his "Afterword" to that contribution: "...what I never told Poul was that I didn't think that Flandry was fighting a useless fight. He wasn't just slowing the coming darkness; he was holding it at bay until something else, something good could happen. So I got to write a story to show what I thought would happen next" [MULTIVERSE, page 305).
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
OK. I will reread and re-comment on these three stories and their authors' afterwords.
As Anderson's characters say, to prolong a peaceful civilization is to extend the number of years in which people can live peacefully. It is not useless.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And, sometimes, for a people or peoples to live mostly peaceful lives requires force and violence being used at the frontiers, to keep at bay those who would destroy that peace. But Flandry did have his darker, more pessimistic moments, wherein we see him having doubts about the value of his struggles and toils.
Stirling said somewhere on this blog that he would love to write a Flandry story. And since I found his Time Patrol pastiche, "A Slip in Time," the single most satisfactory story in MULTIVERSE, I hope Stirling gets his chance to write a Flandry tale for a second MULTIVERSE.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I have changed the post to read "...the two Technic History stories in MULTIVERSE..." because, although I had thought that there were three, I can now find only two.
Paul.
I agree that Feist's is the best attempt If I were doing a Flandry story, I'd set it earlier in his life.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I thought there were three stories in MULTIVERSE with a Technic "background." But you're right, there's only two.
Mr. Stirling: There are so many questions we don't know the answers to in the Technic timeline! Who was the wife of Emperor Georgios? What happened to Leon Ammon in later years? Did Aycharaych survive the bombardment of Chereion? And many other questions easily comes to mind.
How early in Flandry's life might you have written such a story? Before or after Josip died?
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment