EARTH BOOK And SAGA

I am looking at my recently acquired hardback copy of Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate. This purchase was necessary because my paperback copy had begun literally to disintegrate and had also come apart although it is still on a bookshelf in two parts, defying any further sellotaping of its pages back together again. The Earth Book has to be appreciated as a work in itself. In Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III (of VII), the twelve Earth Book instalments are reproduced together with their introductions by Hloch but they are dispersed among twelve other Technic History instalments and also their order is slightly altered. We need copies of both the Earth Book and the Saga, in my opinion.

Hloch's initial introduction to the entire Earth Book makes clear that we are not only reading a future history series but also benefitting from the works of future historiographers, in this case his mother, Rennhi, and himself. This continues in the first collected story where the human narrator describes the Grand Survey, the Star Trek-equivalent period of Technic civilization. Hloch's afterword to this story informs us that it is an extract from:

"...Far Adventure by Maeve Downey, the autobiography of a planetologist."

-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978), p. 33.

Thus, one future historian introduces another. Hloch enhances the stories which were not individually introduced when originally published. The Earth Book enhances the entire first section of the Technic History.