Thursday 4 May 2023

Introductions

The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III, inherited not only Hloch's twelve introductions and one afterword from The Earth Book of Stormgate but also six introductions from the other two earlier collections:

Trader To The Stars
"Hiding Place": Le Matelot, who quotes Shelley

"Territory": an extract from the first van Rijn story, not collected here

"The Master Key": a longer quote from the same poem by Shelley

The Trouble Twisters
"The Three-Cornered Wheel": Vance Hall, Commentaries on the Philosophy of Noah Arkwright

"A Sun Invisible": Noah Arkwright, An Introduction to Sophontology

"The Trouble Twisters": the diary of Urwain the Wide-Faring (about meeting Noah Arkwright)

The three "Arkwright" essays are not introductions but works in their own right. In any case, this shows that fictional introductions are a big part of the Technic History and not just of the Earth Book. 

Of the six remaining works in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III:

"The Saturn Game" and "The Star Plunderer" each already came with a fictional introduction;

Satan's WorldMirkheim and The People of the Wind do not have introductions;

the Earth Book Compiler, Hank Davis, added an appropriate introduction for "Sargasso of Lost Starships."

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Maybe that Introduction by Hank Davis for "Sargasso" was not really needed. IIRC, we speculated "Sargasso" was best understood as a fictional story written centuries later and set in the Early Empire. It might have been enough if Davis had done that.

Ad astra! Sean