EARTH BOOK Blurb

The front flap blurb of Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1978) rightly claims that the Earth Book completes the five volumes of the History of the Polesotechnic League but does not mention that it is also the second Ythrian volume. The blurb does mention that the Earth Book presents:

"...a detailed chart that incorporates many of Anderson's later works in one enormous schema."

- but falls short of clarifying that this schema is the History of Technic Civilization of which the Polesotechnic League is just one phase.

One sentence is reasonably accurate and engaging as blurbs go:

"These twelve adventures chronicle the expansion of earthmen out into the inhabited galaxy, meetings with alien races, the growth and decay of the first interstellar government (a trading association governed by trader-adventurers), followed by the foundation of the first interstellar empire."

The words "foundation" and "empire" recall Isaac Asimov's Foundation And Empire but we are bound to add that Anderson does this much better. His Terran Empire is less implausible and more credible.

"Lodestar," the culminating League story in the Earth Book, begins with characteristic Andersonian action but there is a reason for the action and a serious point to the story.