Thursday, 9 January 2025

Ythrians

The three main sub-sections of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization are Ythrians, League and Empire. Removing these three would leave only six instalments:

1 post-Chaos
1 post-League
4 post-Empire

Ythrians appear in five short stories, all collected in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, and in two novels.

The People Of The Wind is set on the human-Ythrian colony planet, Avalon.

The Earth Book, notionally compiled shortly after the events of The People..., is fictitiously compiled by an Avalonian Ythrian.

In The Day Of Their Return, another Avalonian Ythrian visits the human colony planet, Aeneas.

Thus, these three volumes form an Ythrian trilogy although other Technic History volumes intervene between the Earth Book and The Day...

The seven Ythrian instalments were published in 1973 except the first which was in 1972. Despite this, they are distributed very widely throughout the History:

Grand Survey: 1
early League period: 1
late League period: 1
very near the dissolution of the League: 2
early Empire: 1 novel
later Empire: 1 novel
post-Empire: 0 (although we are bound to wonder what has become of the Domain and of Avalon)

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!


To say nothing of how I still wonder what happened to Terra's great enemy, Merseia, after the Empire fell. If we can go by the omission of any mention of "Merseian autonomous realms" in the four post-Imperial stories, nothing good!

Ad astra! Sean