The Slow Build-Up

Anyone who reads Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization for the first time in Baen Books' seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga, compiled by Hank Davis, can have no idea of what is ahead of them. The build-up to a major future history series is imperceptible. Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, collects eleven installments, including one novel. However, the first six of these installments contain no single continuing character. Over the course of the remaining five installments in this volume, David Falkayn reappears once and Nicholas van Rijn three times so that eventually historical continuity is complemented by an amount of character continuity although not focusing on any single individual.

Planets and organizations are mentioned without any hint of their later importance. On this blog, I need not list their names yet again. Seven of the eleven installments in this volume had been among the twelve that had been previously collected as The Earth Book Of Stormgate and therefore bring with them into the Saga their Earth Book introductions. In particular, the introduction to the third story, "The Problem of Pain," presents significant background information about the founding of the Solar Commonwealth. Hloch, the Avalonian Ythrian editor of the Earth Book, makes his contribution to the wider Technic History. His Earth Book stretches across only the first two and a half volumes of the Saga.