Subtleties And Complexities

 

The immediately preceding post, Flandry And Amalfi, has diverted my attention to yet again contemplating the subtleties and complexities of Poul Anderson's massive future history series, the History of Technic Civilization. A long series of short stories and serialized novels was published in magazines from January 1951 to 1981 with some stories instead appearing in original themed anthologies and two further novels published as books without prior serialization in 1979 and 1985. The order of writing and publication is not the chronological order of fictional events. Anderson wrote not only sequels but also prequels to previously published works. Also, when an sf series has grown to become a future history series, the author later adds installments to earlier periods.

After magazines and anthologies came the publication of volumes written only by Anderson. Stories were republished in collections and novels were republished as single volumes. However, the order of reading was not yet that of fictional events. Finally, Baen Books published the seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga in which every installment can for the first time be read in chronological order.

The original book reading order begins with Trader To The Stars followed by The Trouble Twisters whereas the Saga begins with Volume I, The Van Rijn Method followed by Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader. Since Nicholas van Rijn is the titular character of Trader To The Stars and David Falkayn is the leader of the "Trouble Twisters" team, there is a parallelism between the two reading orders. However, "Hiding Place" is the first of three stories in Trader To The Stars but is the eleventh of eleven stories in The Van Rijn Method so clearly a lot has happened in the history before Trader To The Stars starts.

The second story in Trader To The Stars, "Territory," begins by quoting from "Margin of Profit," the earliest written van Rijn short story, and the third story, "The Master Key," refers to van Rijn as the conqueror of Bothu, Diomedes and T'Kela. "Diomedes" is a reference to the first van Rijn novel.

I am out of here.