Anonymous Future Historians

Poul Anderson's Technic History is both future history and future historiography. We know the names of some of the future historians:

Hloch and his sources for the Earth Book, including Christopher Holm;

Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society.

Others remain anonymous and are almost embedded in their texts.

"Consider Ensign Helen Kittredge. We pick her name at random out of personnel data."

-The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 276.

Who are "We"? Someone looks through personnel files after the Magnusson Rebellion and constructs a hypothetical account of Helen Kittredge's last days. She might have had leave on Ansa. It is certain that she died when Zeta Sagittarii was lost but the anonymous narrator of this chapter is free to speculate how:

"We would like to imagine Ensign Helen Kittredge is spared..." (p. 284)

- thirst or radiation poisoning. We would - while we also wonder about the identity and provenance of our mysterious informant.

So much time has elapsed that it is almost certainly a later narrator who informs us, in an italicized introductory paragraph, that Christopher Wren's name:

"...is yet remembered..."

-Poul Anderson, "A Tragedy of Errors," IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012) AT pp. 455-540 AT p. 457.

This is not the omniscient narrator but a historian living a long time after Roan Tom:

"Later ages wove a myth about Roan Tom. He became their archetype of those star rovers who fared forth while the Long Night prevailed." (ibid.)

- just as Nicholas van Rijn was an archetype of the merchant princes of the Polesotechnic League. The Man Who Counts is published in the Solar Commonwealth and collected in the Earth Book. (The Technic History has star rovers just as the Time Patrol series has time rovers: two complementary series.)

The historian of the Long Night imagines Roan Tom reflecting, "...in his particular Valhalla...":

"'Look,' one can imagine him drawling, 'we had to eat...'" (p. 458)

I would like this scene to be dramatized in full when the Technic History is filmed, a play within the play: Roan Tom in his Valhalla, smoking Earthgrown tobacco. His first-person reminiscence segues into the third-person narrative of the story which concludes with an italicized coda. There are three more instalments in the Technic History but no more future historians. The texts return to the omniscient narrator of most prose fiction. (But see here.)