Shaping History Or Living In It

For a mere short story, Poul Anderson's "The Sensitive Man" is extraordinarily rich in cover images. You might suspect that I have been spinning out the discussion of this story in order to keep showing different images for it. You might be right. But we have nearly come to the end of the images that I can find on the Internet.

Contrast the opening four stories of Anderson's Psychotechnic History:

"Marius"

"Un-Man"

"The Sensitive Man"

"The Big Rain"

- with the opening four or five stories of his Technic History:

"The Saturn Game"

"Wings of Victory"

"The Problem of Pain"

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson"/"Margin of Profit" (stories overlap)

In the Psychotechnic stories, the protagonists are struggling to shape the course of future history whereas, in the Technic stories, the characters are simply living and working in successive periods of their history. In the fifth Psychotechnic story, "Quixote and the Windmill," the main character loudly complains about the period he is living in! So the emphasis remains on consciousness of history rather than just living in it. (In this character's case, not working in it, which is what he complains about.)

We are grateful to Anderson for enabling us to contrast an earlier, shorter

future history series with a later, longer such series. As we read both of these series, we see the author's skills grow and the concept develop. Start with Robert Heinlein's Future History, to be followed by these two Anderson series.