Series: Heinlein; Anderson (2)

The previous post, despite barely mentioning Poul Anderson, was pertinent because Dupin is highly relevant to Holmes and both Holmes and Heinlein are highly relevant to Anderson. 

In Heinlein's Future History, a handful of characters appear twice but no more than that and the main connection between the stories is their settings. The ten stories collected in Volume II, The Green Hills of Earth, are all set in the same period of early interplanetary travel with Luna City on the Moon, Drywater on Mars and Venusburg on Venus. Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, directly modelled on the Future History, resembles it also in this respect. Three characters appear twice. The stories are interconnected because they are set in successive periods of a fictional history.

Anderson's later, longer Technic History incorporates three main series characters with their supporting casts but also is a future history series on the Heinlein model. We recognise a story as belonging to the series if it makes certain background references just as we recognize a TV drama as an episode of a Star Trek series if its characters wear Starfleet uniforms.

"'My family was well-to-do, but they were - are - Jerusalem Catholics.'"

-Poul Anderson, "The Saturn Game" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009), pp. 1-73.

If we are reading the Technic History in chronological order of fictional events, then we do not yet know that Jerusalem Catholics will play major roles in later periods. Nevertheless, this single reference is enough to locate "The Saturn Game" in the Technic History timeline.