A recent comparison between the Stellar Union and the Commonalty (here) drew me back into appreciating "Starfog," set in the same timeline as Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry but much further in the future than either of them. If we read "Starfog" at the end of Flandry's Legacy, then we know from the outset that this story is the concluding installment of Poul Anderson's Technic History. However, if instead we read it at the end of the collection, Explorations (New York, 1981) - or, indeed, if we had read when it was originally published in Analog, August 1967 - then we do not immediately know that it is part of a series.
The human viewpoint character, Daven Laure, is neither a Master Merchant of the Polesotechnic League nor an Intelligence officer of the Terran Empire but a Ranger of the Commonalty. We have yet to learn what this means. Laure's spaceship, Jaccavrie, has a computer that seems to a higher powered successor of David Falkayn's Muddlehead. Jaccavrie simultaneously:
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would argue, however, that Daven Laure's mention in "Starfog" of the League, the Troubles, the Empire, etc., would alert readers in 1967 who had read them that the story belongs to the
same timeline as the earlier pub. van Rijn and Flandry tales.
And Jaccavrie scanning that "memory cylinder" is just a teensy bit dated. I think we today would say the computer scanned a "memory bank" or "data base."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Starting to read "Starfog," we do not yet realize that it is part of a series. Then the references to the League etc place the story in the Technic History timeline.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree with that "starting."
And in Daven Laure's time SOME people might have been starting to get seriously curious about what had happened to Terra in the millennia since the Empire fell. So I can imagine arrangements being made to send an expedition to find out.
Ad astra! Sean
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