Multiple Beginnings

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization has multiple beginnings. One of the best of them is the unentitled introduction to Trader To The Stars which, without any explanation, is signed "Le Matelot." It begins:

"'The world's great age begins anew...'"

-Poul Anderson, Trader To The Stars (New York, 1966), p. 5.

Trader To The Stars was Technic History, Volume I, in the original book publication order. Le Matelot introduces not only the opening story, "Hiding Place," but also the entire Polesotechnic League period and, by extension, beyond that, the entire Technic History. However, when the Technic History was collected in chronological order of fictional events in Baen Books' seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga, Le Matelot, now treated as introducing just a single story, appears very near the end of Volume I, The Van Rijn Method. "Hiding Place," although the first story in Trader To The Stars, is the eleventh and last story in The Van Rijn Method! In any case, the first published van Rijn story was not "Hiding Place" but "Margin of Profit" which became the fourth story in The Van Rijn Method. In The Earth Book of Stormgate, which, according to its entirely accurate front cover blurb, "spans, illuminates and completes the magnificent future history of the Polesotechnic League," the opening story is "Wings of Victory" and, for nine years, that was the first story in the Technic History although, in The Van Rijn Method, it is displaced by the later-written "The Saturn Game." The earliest published Technic History instalment was the first Captain Flandry story, "Tiger By The Tail," although the later-written "Young Flandry" novels are set earlier. Multiple beginnings.

In The Van Rijn Method, Le Matelot should precede not "Hiding Place" but "Margin of Profit."