Introductions IV

(IX) The "Margin of Profit" extract used to introduce "Territory" expounds the technological and economic underpinnings of the Polesotechnic League:

automation means cheap manufacturing;

the proton converter means cheap energy;

gravity control and quantum hyperdrive make the Polesotechnic League "...a supergovernment, sprawling from Canopus to Polaris..." - Poul Anderson, Trader To The Stars (New York, 1966), p. 54 - with a trans-political, trans-cultural, multi-species membership spreading a universal civilization and a lasting peace.

(X) The Shelley verse:

"A loftier Argo cleaves the main,

"Fraught with a later prize;

"Another Orpheus sings again,

"And loves, and weeps, and dies.

"A new Ulysses leaves one more

"Calypso for his native shore." (ibid., p. 115)

- is symbolic. A spaceship is an Argo. Profits are a later prize. Merchant princes are potential mythic/epic figures - although Anderson's closest approach to Orpheus, Hugh Valland, is in a different fictional future, World Without Stars.

The narratives confirm that the League is multi-species. Van Rijn has an alien secretary. Even on Earth, a merchants' conference includes a Martian and a Centaurian. On the planet Vanessa, a Jaleelan factor with a Kraokan liaison officer sits beneath the League emblem with the motto, "All The Traffic Will Bear," (written in old English or contemporary Anglic?) and converses in League Latin ("ad fortunam tuam") with the Hermetain David Falkayn. Later the factor even says, "'...some of my best friends are human!'" - Poul Anderson, "A Sun Invisible" IN Anderson, The Trouble Twisters (New York, 1967), pp. 55-93 AT p. 85 (Latin phrase, p. 67).

Finding ourselves to be only one intelligent species among many will be a bigger experiential threshold than the isolation of interplanetary travel. In fact, the opening story, "The Saturn Game," is the only Technic History instalment that involves no alien contact. Although the second story, "Wings of Victory," recounts human first contact with Ythri, the xenologist in the crew has in his youth studied Cynthians and also knows of Woden.

Human beings often coexist with elves, orcs etc in fantasy and with extraterrestrials in sf. When Falkayn reflects that is own species is among the most predatory in the universe, this is not necessarily a serious extrapolation but is an auctorial comment on humanity.