People Of The Wind And Of The Sea

To complete the line of thought of the immediately preceding post:

the Polesotechnic League tetralogy is followed by a single Ythrian novel, The People Of The Wind;

the second group of eighteen Polesotechnic League instalments is sandwiched between two sets of two Ythrian short stories in The Earth Book Of Stormgate.

The structure of that first section of Poul Anderson's Technic History is endlessly fascinating, especially since it was not designed but grew. We can analyse the series into building blocks of narratives and of pairs or groups of narratives but it was not consciously preconceived or constructed in such a way. The stories of individual people and their organizations and planets developed organically.

But maybe it is time to return to The Byworlder where tens of thousands of people live permanently at sea. Several fleets of large ships move constantly across international waters, fishing, farming, prospecting for ore or oil, carrying freight, extracting minerals from seawater and processing seaweed for food and fabric. One flagship is a floating conurb for four thousand people. Its half-dozen companion ships include a service ship, a kelp-processing factory ship, a mineral-extractor craft and a trawler. Others are beyond the horizon. Skip and Yvonne meet on the flagship and the story continues.