Complicated Narratives

Perhaps Poul Anderson's Technic History is most complicated in its opening instalments. All four sections of "The Saturn Game" are introduced by extracts from A Dissenting View by Francis L. Minamoto. We read neither his entire view nor the view from which he is dissenting! Each of the sections is, as far as possible, a third person account with no viewpoint character, the only exception being when Scobie is alone and buried so that the narrative can recount only his point of view.

Hloch compiles and introduces The Earth Book of Stormgate, a companion volume to his mother's The Sky Book of Stormgate which also we do not read. In the first Earth Book instalment, "Wings of Victory," a first person narrator who remains in the orbiting Olga recounts the experiences of three other crew members on the surface of Ythri. Hloch afterwards tells us that this narrator is the planetologist, Maeve Downey, and that the story is an extract from her autobiography, Far Adventure.

In the second Earth Book instalment, "The  Problem of Pain," a third person account of Peter Berg's experiences on Gray/Avalon is framed by a first person account of a conversation with Berg on Lucifer. Hloch explains the complicated process by which this account came into his mother's possession via Earth and Esperance. 

Earth Book instalments either are extracts from other works or are specially written by Hloch and/or Arinnian of Stormgate Choth whose human name is Christopher Holm and who is a character in The People of the Wind, a title that applies primarily to the winged Ythrians but might also apply to the many human Avalonians who, like Holm, join choths and fly with antigrav belts.

Complicated, you must admit.