What Hloch Does

Again, let's be clear about how much Hloch does and does not do. Of course it is Jim Ching who tells us that he is presenting his first person account of his dealings with Adzel and that Adzel helped him to become a spaceman. However, it is Hloch who adds that:

Jim wrote reminiscences throughout his life;

he settled in Carawrayannis on Llynathawr;

his descendants kept his notebooks;

they made them available to Rennhi.

Thus, the resources available to Hloch when compiling The Earth Book of Stormgate included Rennhi's copies of Jim's notebooks. "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" is an excerpt from an early notebook. We would have known nothing of Jim Ching's life after his single story if not for Hloch's much later written introduction to it.

By contrast, "Margin of Profit," the earliest published van Rijn story but collected later in the Earth Book, is a third person account by an omniscient narrator. It is only Hloch that informs us that this story is an excerpt from Tales of the Great Frontier by A. A. Craig. Hloch states that folk tales of van Rijn exist on many inhabited planets and that there are also many accounts of him in Library Central on Avalon although such accounts are no longer widely read because Avalonians focus instead on their Founder, David Falkayn. It seems then that, for this particular inclusion in the Earth Book, Hloch needed only to lift a text directly from Library Central whereas some of the other instalments, like "Lodestar," required considerable research.

The rationale for including three stories specifically about Nicholas van Rijn is as follows. Falkayn founded Avalon. Van Rijn had been Falkayn's mentor. Therefore, to understand their Founder, Avalonians need to be informed about van Rijn. In real life, Poul Anderson was collecting most of the remaining Technic History stories and Hloch's placing of these stories in the context of the founding of Avalon was an excellent framing device that qualitatively enriches the History.