Sunday 3 January 2021

Quantity Versus Quality

Star Trek has proliferated into multiple series but can do that because it is multi-authored. Larry Niven's Known Space grew by becoming multi-authored. CJ Cherryh's Alliance-Union future history series is twenty seven novels plus seven anthologies. Poul Anderson's Technic History is impressively vast for a single-author work, comprising forty three installments, including at least ten novels, depending on how we classify them.

I gather that Picard, Enterprise Captain in the second Star Trek series, has acquired his own series. I once saw a paperback that was a volume of a series about a Klingon Bird of Prey Commander. Anderson was not able to match all that quantity. However, in his "Wings of Victory," both the Grand Survey and the character of Aram Turekian are what I call proto-series and one passage in The Game Of Empire recounts a mission led by Afal Uroch of the Vach Rueth, commanding a Fangryf-type gunboat. Everything is there in Anderson except, impossibly, more quantity.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think it was just as well that Anderson did not "open" up his Technic series to other writers. Aside from Feist's "The Candle" and Stirling's "A Slip in Time," I was not really happy with the contributions other authors made to Anderson's worlds in MULTIVERSE.

Feist's comments to his story interested me because of how he did not think Dominic Flandry was truly fighting a lost battle against the oncoming night--he was lighting a candle to stave off the darkness. And Feist regretted never having told Anderson that.

And Jerry Pournelle open up his Co-Dominium timeline to contributions by other writers, either as co-authors or single authors. And Anderson made his own addition to the series with "The Deserter."

Ad astra! Sean