Narrators That Are In There

Poul Anderson's Technic History most resembles Robert Heinlein's Future History when an instalment is narrated as if it had been written as a magazine article addressing a contemporary audience within the relevant future period:

"The travelling-public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service..."

-Robert Heinlein, "Space Jockey" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 19-36 AT p. 20.

"The Commerce Commission has set the charges for the present three-stage lift to the moon at thirty dollars a pound."

-ibid., p. 21.

(They have not had inflation.)

"...Trans-Lunar uses rockets braced for catapulting, and winged for landing on return to Earth..."

-ibid.

"It has only been the past five years that [the Supra-New York satellite station] has even been equipped to offer the comfort of one-gravity centrifuge service..."

-ibid.

This is the most obvious example in the Future History. Although the narration in this story is not in the first person, the narrator is right there among the places and events that he describes. "...the past five years..." means that he is writing at the time of the events of the story.

The Poul Anderson example is less full on but nevertheless present:

"Elfland is the new section of Lunograd. So it is written, and therefore believed by the computers of administrative authority. Living beings know better. They see marvels, beauties, gaieties, a place for pleasure and heartbreak. They experience a magic that is unique.

"But in the old town underground, the machines are always working."

-Poul Anderson, Satan's World IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, March 2010), pp. 329-596 AT I, p. 329.

"Elfland was the new section..." would have implied an omniscient narrator abstracted from the period of Technic History that he is describing whereas the consistent present tense means that this text is narrated by someone who is alive at the time when Elfland has recently been added to Lunograd.

In the very next sentence, the action starts and the tense changes:

"...David Falkayn halted. 'Well, my love,' he said..."

-ibid.

Falkayn makes his fifth appearance. We do not know who the narrator is but he is a contemporary of Falkayn.