History And Historiography

Poul Anderson's Technic History is dynamic because, in my perception at least, it keeps jumping back and forth between its two reading orders. After The Trouble Twisters, Part III, "The Trouble Twisters," the two parallel narratives are represented by "The Day of Burning," a trader team novella that does not mention van Rijn, and by "The Master Key," a novella in which van Rijn remains in his lounger in the Winged Cross in Chicago Integrate while solving a mystery on an extra-solar planet. After that, the two narratives of the trader team and of van Rijn merge in Satan's World, "Lodestar" and Mirkheim which brings us to the end of the Polesotechnic League section of the Technic History. But, of course, in the original reading order, we pass directly from The Trouble Twisters to Satan's World. The later collection, The Earth Book of Stormgate, performs a "Now it can be told" role by informing us, e.g., about Adzel's student days on Earth in "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," what Falkayn did on Merseia in "Day of Burning" and how van Rijn came to Mirkheim in "Lodestar." That these stories, whether read in the Earth Book or in The Technic Civilization Saga, are introduced by Hloch, an Ythrian living centuries later on Falkayn's colony planet, Avalon, adds a deeper historical perspective. We read both future history and fictional historiography. At the midpoint of The Technic Civilization, Volume III, Rise of the Terran Empire, Hloch of Stormgate Choth signs off and is immediately followed by Donvar Ayeghen, President of the Galactic Archaeological Society. However, Ayeghen had introduced "The Star Plunderer" when it was originally published in Planet Stories whereas Hloch's introductions and afterword are an extra, extremely dense, narrative layer added in the Earth Book collection. The Technic History was not planned but grew like that.