"The Bitter Bread" And Literary Heaven

Poul Anderson, "The Bitter Bread" IN Anderson, Explorations (New York, 1981), pp. 82-116.

From The Enemy Stars, we pass to its sequel, "The Ways of Love" and to the closely related "The Bitter Bread." Both are collected in Explorations. "The Bitter Bread" is set in a very similar timeline with a post-nuclear-war Protectorate and a retired spaceman who describes himself as a "'...techno...'" (p. 83) living on Orkney but North America remains politically powerful. The situation with interstellar travel is quite complicated and I am probably not going to reread any more of it this evening. 

Meanwhile, let us contemplate the idea of a literary heaven in which Poul Anderson's Technic History and Stieg Larsson's Millennium series, no longer a trilogy, are continued, not merely prolonged but developed, indefinitely. Although Anderson had drawn the Technic History to a close, it retains unlimited potential. Larsson had planned ten volumes and commenced a fourth. In this imaginary heaven, we would experience both series in every medium, including fully immersive virtual reality. We would live in the Solar Commonwealth and hear reports of missions of the Muddlin' Through crew. We would also live in Stockholm and see reports of Millennium magazine's two scoops. The Millennium Trilogy is close to becoming a series that I could reread endlessly although it would have been better for this purpose in ten volumes. I question whether the Technic History can ever be surpassed as a future history series in the way that it does surpass Robert Heinlein's Future History. 

Signing off for tonight, I am about to finish rereading Millennium, Volume III.