Adzel: "'And when I got a scholarship to study planetology on Earth, I earned extra money by singing Fafnir in the San Francisco Opera.'"
Chee Lan: "'Also by parading at Chinese New Year's...'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 77-208 AT II, p. 93.
Nine years after the publication of that story, Anderson brilliantly derived "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" from it. Young Adzel is studying at the Clement Institute of Planetology in San Francisco and needs money...
In "Margin of Profit," which introduces van Rijn, that Master Merchant recounts the following anecdote from the days when he himself "'...was a rough and tumbler...'" (p. 143):
a petty native prince had conditioned a man to keep him as a technical expert;
van Rijn and his companions caught the man and took him home for treatment;
before leaving, they blew up the palace.
That anecdote also could have been expanded into a prequel story but we can't have everything.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think Anderson meant that "Clement Institute of Planetology" as a compliment to a fellow SF writer, Hal Clement, whose stories, such as MISSION OF GRAVITY, he admired. The works of Clement helped to inspire Anderson for writing THE MAN WHO COUNTS.
I too wished Anderson might have written one or two more Technic stories: a Young Nick story and another set in Dominic Flandry's old age.
Ad astra! Sean
Quoting from memory from the intro to one story:
"There was a king who thought to set himself above the foreign merchants. Harry Steinveig and I hung him by the seat of his breeches from the tallest minaret in his city, and the name of the League was great in the land."
I always laughed at that one.
"The Master Key."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You keep coming up with apt quotes from the works of Anderson!
Ad astra! Sean
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