What Van Rijn Has Learned

Poul Anderson, "Hiding Place" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, December 2009).

Nicholas van Rijn says that he has:

"'...learned...how to make men do things for me, and then how to make something profitable from all their doings.'" (p. 595)

That is the theme, and the meaning of the title, of the van Rijn novel, The Man Who Counts. Van Rijn is also the title character of Trader To The Stars and The Van Rijn Method. He is the equivalent of DD Harriman, title character of Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon" and The Man Who Sold The Moon. (A story becomes the title story of a collection.)

Before that, van Rijn had said:

"'I am no kind of specialist, I have no fine university degrees, I learned in the school of hard knockers.'" (ibid.)

I remember a business man on British TV saying defiantly, "I got my degree in the school of hard knocks!" That is fine, man, but listen to what someone else says, will you? (As van Rijn does.) I visited a class in a British agricultural college where one of the students had grown up working on an Irish farm. Imagine how much she contributed to the course - and learned from it.

Years ago, a local guy on a bus identified me as (at that time) a University student and announced to no one in particular but obviously for my benefit that "We want practical, not theoretical!" What a misunderstanding. Theory guides practice. Practice tests theory. We cannot have either without the other. People use technology produced by scientific research, like that bus we were travelling in and, hopefully in the future, hyperspace ships like the ones that van Rijn travels in.