Rattlewing II

"A book such as this would be rattlewing indeed did it not tell us anything about Falkayn himself. Yet there seems no lift in repeating common knowledge or reprinting tales which, in their different versions, are as popular and available as ever aforetime."

-Poul Anderson, INTRODUCTION IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 209-210 AT p. 209.

This seems to mean that the entire contents of The Trouble Twisters, Satan's World and Mirkheim are, in Hloch's time, either common knowledge or popular and available.

Indeed:

"The rest would appear to be everyone's knowledge: how at last, inevitably, the secret of Mirkheim's existence was ripped asunder; how the contest for its possession brought on the Babur War; how that struggle turned out to be the first civil war in the Commonwealth and gave the Polesotechnic League a mortal wound."

-Poul Anderson, INTRODUCTION IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 293-294 AT p. 293.

This passage not only summarizes Mirkheim but also immediately follows it in Rise Of The Terran Empire which is Volume III of The Technic Civilization Saga. Hloch's explanatory passages which had been unheaded in The Earth Book Of Stormgate become "INTRODUCTION" or, in one case, "AFTERWORD" in the Saga. His first introductory passage, headed "THE EARTH BOOK OF STORMGATE" in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, becomes "INTRODUCTION WINGS OF VICTORY" in the Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method. (Literary layers.)

Fortunately, Hloch is able to avoid "rattlewing" by including two previously uncollected David Falkayn stories, "Day of Burning" and "Lodestar," which:

are accounts, respectively, of what Falkayn did on Merseia and at Mirkheim;

 

are based on information extracted from data units that van Rijn and Falkayn had left for safe-keeping on Hermes;

 

are written for the Earth Book by Hloch and Arinnian.

 

"Lodestar" also required research on Ythri.

 

Complicated: more so than any other future history series, I think.