Another Of Hloch's Introductions

"Lodestar" is a climax of four interweaving themes in Poul Anderson's Technic History:

the Polesotechnic League;

 

Nicholas van Rijn, Master Merchant of the Polesotechnic League;

 

David Falkayn, apprentice, journeyman, then Master Merchant;

 

van Rijn's trader team led by Falkayn.

 

Falkayn and the team address an imbalance in the League first by hypothesizing, then seeking and finding, the supermetal-rich planet Mirkheim and secondly by concealing the existence of such an unprecedented source of wealth while at the same time helping the underdeveloped planets to mine and market the rare supermetals even though this goes against the interests of their employer, van Rijn, who would undoubtedly have monopolized Mirkheim if they had simply handed the planet over to him, as their employment contracts had obligated them to do.

 

In The Earth Book Of Stormgate, "Lodestar" is immediately followed by "Wingless," about Falkayn's grandson, and Hloch's introduction to "Wingless" begins:

 

"The rest would appear to be everyone's knowledge: how, at last, inevitably, the secret of Mikheim's existence was ripped asunder; how the contest for its possession brought on the Babur War; how that struggle turned out to be the first civil war in the Commonwealth and gave the Polesotechnic League a mortal wound."

-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), p. 409.

 

This is "everyone's knowledge" if we have read the novel, Mirkheim, before reading the Earth Book. The sentence summarizes the plot of that novel. However, in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II ends with "Lodestar" and Volume III begins with Mirkheim followed by "Wingless." Thus, the sentence beginning "The rest...," assuming that we have just finished reading "Lodestar," instead comes immediately after the novel whose plot it now unnecessarily summarizes.