Saturday, 15 June 2024

Military SF In The Technic History

The military sf in Poul Anderson's Technic History is in:

"Margin of Profit"
The Man Who Counts
Satan's World
Mirkheim
"The Star Plunderer"
"Sargasso of Lost Starships"
The People Of The Wind
Ensign Flandry
The Rebel Worlds
"Outpost of Empire"
"Tiger by the Tail"
"The Game of Glory"
"Hunters of the Sky Cave"
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows
The Game Of Empire

(Some readers might draw the line in different places.) Quite a lot but imagine if the whole History were nothing but the activities of the navies of the Solar Commonwealth, the Polesotechnic League, the Terran Empire etc.

When the Merseians take military action on Gorrazan in The Game Of Empire, it feels as if we are reading a future history not only of mankind but also of Merseia and some other species.

Merseia is:

contacted by the Grand Survey;
saved from supernova radiation by the trader team;
a distant but growing threat at the time of the Terran-Ythrian War;
the major opponent of the Terran Empire in Flandry's time;
no longer an interstellar power, apparently, at the time of the Commonalty.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

A good list, one I agree with, even if I don't usually think of Anderson as a military science fiction writer the way the late David Drake was.

What happened to Merseia during the post-Imperial era is one of the many mysteries we don't know the answers to!

Ad astra! Sean