Wednesday, 29 January 2025

Revisiting The Earth Book

I know that I have listed good points about Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate more than once but am still not sure whether I have compiled a comprehensive list. Let's try again:

the Earth Book is the fifth Polesotechnic League volume and the second Ythrian volume;

it completes the story of the Polesotechnic League and almost completes the story of human-Ythrian interactions;

it refers to the Terran Empire although not to Dominic Flandry because that character has not been born yet;

its twelve new introductions and one new afterword substantially enhance the Technic History by adding background information about historical periods and even about the later lives of some of the characters;

it itself is a single volume future history series because its opening instalment is set during the first Grand Survey (pre-League), its closing instalment is set during the second stage of the colonization of Avalon (post-League) and its additional material is fictitiously written in an even later period after the Terran-Ythrian War;

it completes the first phase of the Technic History and prepares the way for the second.

Rereading of The Boat Of A Million Years will resume shortly.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And Hloch took a special interest in the Diomedeans we see in THE MAN WHO COUNTS because of how rare intelligent flying species are. It's the old problem, intelligence requires a sufficiently large and hence heavy body, and the ability to fly requires a body's weight being as light as possible.

It was the peculiarities of Diomedes and Ythri which eventually allowed flying intelligent species to evolve there.

Ad astra! Sean