Nicholas van Rijn, owner of the independent company, Solar Spice & Liquors, stays in a suite in the Hotel Universe in Lunograd. We know van Rijn from nine previous Technic History instalments. Two of his employees, Adzel and Chee Lan, had stayed in the Hotel Universe in the eighth of those earlier instalments, Satan's World. Van Rijn invites two other Polesotechnic League Council delegates to dinner in his suite. He had spoken with Hanny Lennart of Global Cybernetics and of the Home Companies consortium in Mirkheim, Prologue, Y minus 9, whereas Bayard Story of Galactic Developments and of the Seven in Space consortium is new to us (we think) as well as to van Rijn and Lennart. However, Story will turn out to be an alias of Benoni Strang who had already appeared in Mirkheim, Prologue, Y minus 28, Y minus 12 and Y minus 5. Complicated. A pyramidally structured future history series continually both refers and adds to background information provided by previous instalments.
The nine-part Prologue to Mirkheim adds nine earlier layers of narrative without requiring the author to add nine earlier complete instalments! The first part of the Prologue is Y minus 500,000, a reminder that fictional histories set in our future are, like everything else, grounded in the deep past.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but the Technic series was not planned to be pyramidally written. It began very much as an accidental, ad hoc series first linked by that impulsive mention of Polesotechnarch van Rijn in THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS. It was part of Anderson's skill as a writer to make it pyramidal and, mostly, accommodate as parts of the series any inconsistencies.
Ad astra! Sean
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