Satan's World In Its Context

Like many others, I am sure, I first read Poul Anderson's Satan's World, as a paperback novel, thus as a single volume of 217 pages. This text is placed in a completely different context when it is read, or reread, as one of seven items collected in an omnibus volume of 692 pages, especially when it is known that this volume in turn is just one of seven, all of comparable length! What had been a satisfactory conclusion to a single novel instead becomes just one stage in a considerably longer narrative about the lives not only of the individual characters but also of their entire civilization and indeed of several civilizations after that. This is not the only American future history series or even the only such series written by Poul Anderson but I think that it is the completest fulfilment of Robert Heinlein's original concept and I would have preferred if Anderson had stayed with the Technic History rather than written some of his later works.