Another Summary

 

I do not have access to everything that Sandra Miesel has written about Poul Anderson's Technic History but here is one other piece:

Sandra Miesel, "Afterword: The Price of Buying Time" IN Poul Anderson, A Stone In Heaven (New York, 1979), pp. 237-251.

Again, Miesel summarizes the Technic History, making it seem real and fresh in the process. Someone with appropriate creative skills would be able to write an entire Wellsian-Stapledonian fictitious historical text book based on this series by Anderson. Miesel goes a short way beyond what Anderson had written but just enough to make us feel that this is how it must have happened. How did the twentieth century that was known to us grow into the future history created by Anderson? This account still rings true. War, famine and disaster caused social upheavals that obliterated some societies but also produced a freer international order. Miesel writes without the additional information and insights later provided by "The Saturn Game" (1981) As in Anderson's earlier Psychotechnic History:

"Rational solutions were found to old problems like energy and population." (p. 237)

English, simplified and enriched with loan words, becomes Anglic. A technologically based synthesis of Western and other cultures becomes Technic civilization. Poul Anderson discussed such transitional details in his SFWA Bulletin article on future histories. The Solar System is explored - as described later in "The Saturn Game." Orbital, Lunar and other colonies are established although the terraforming of Venus is not fully successful as mentioned by Anderson in The Rebel Worlds. The Solar Commonwealth is established. Extra-solar exploration and colonization begin as described in "Wings of Victory" and "The Problem of Pain." Individual stories are like beads on the string of the history.