"Esau" (1970)
"The Master Key" (1971)
"Lodestar" (1973)
Mirkheim (1977)
"Margin of Profit," revised (1978)
So van Rijn had a lot more life in him yet. In fact, in fictional terms, Sandra Tamarin thinks:
"Why, he's old..."
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT XIX, p. 253 -
- but then:
"And then van Rijn, damn his sooty heart, refused to be pitiable but grabbed her hand, bestowed a splashing kiss upon it, and pumped it as if he expected water to gush from her mouth."
-ibid., p. 254.
And, at the end of his last novel, Mirkheim, van Rijn is proposing years of work to be followed by an expedition outside known space. Both the character and his series continued for longer than expected.
2 comments:
I think Blish was being a bit of a snob.
Kaor, Paul!
As Stirling said, I fear Blish was here being snobbish, looking down his nose at "vulgar" space opera SF. And I simply can't have a high opinion of STAR TREK when I compare it to the best of the written SF being composed in the 1960's by Anderson, Asimov, Blish (!), Bradbury, Clark, Heinlein, Norton, etc.
And I love that part of MIRKHEIM where, after 30 or more years, we see Old Nick again meeting Grand Duchess Sandra and irrepressibly refused to be a pitiable old man!
Given the antisenescence of Technic meditechics, Old Nick would have TIME to spend five or ten years patching up the Polesotechnic League well enough that it might stagger along for another generation or two. And then go for one last, years long, voyage of exploration outside of known space.
Ad astra! Sean
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