Revisiting Beginnings And Endings

We often contemplate beginnings and endings because they are important in history, including fictional history. Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League Tetralogy begins with Trader To The Stars, three stories about Nicholas van Rijn, and ends with Mirkheim, a novel about van Rijn and his trader team but also about the beginning of the end of the League. In the earlier publication order, the first part of Anderson's History of Technic Civilization - corresponding to the first three volumes of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga - begins with Trader To The Stars and ends with The Earth Book Of Stormgate which collects twelve Technic History instalments, including three about van Rijn, one about the trader team and one about both, but also begins before the League and ends after it. 

We have come a long way from Captain Torrance in van Rijn's space yacht, the Hebe G.B., at the beginning of Trader To The Stars to Jack Birnam and Ayan, Wyvan of the Stormgate Choth on Avalon, at the end of the last Earth Book instalment or, indeed, from first contact with Ythri at the beginning of the Earth Book to Jack and Ayan or, indeed, from the exploration of the Saturnian System at the beginning of the Saga to Jack and Ayan: many beginnings - and Jack and Ayan are far from the end. On the last page of the Earth Book, we are addressed for the last time by the Ythrian historian, Hloch, who writes long after Jack and Ayan, shortly after the Terran-Ythrian War recounted in The People Of The Wind and before the nine-volume Dominic Flandry period and its single-volume sequel, these ten volumes corresponding to Saga, Volumes IV-VII. The periods are linked by the Terran Empire which the Domain of Ythri, including Avalon, fights but Flandry defends - mainly from Merseia which the trader team had helped.

The eight League instalments collected in the Earth Book begin with "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" and end with "Lodestar." "How To Be Ethnic..." is contemporaneous with and followed by "Margin of Profit," the earliest published van Rijn story, which had been quoted in Trader To The Stars but which had had to be revised before it could be fully incorporated into the Technic History. In "How To Be Ethnic...," the Solar Commonwealth is a safe place to live whereas, by the time of "Lodestar," it has acquired problems which climax in Mirkheim.

The glimpses of domestic life that are welcome in "How To Be Ethnic..." are faintly echoed in "Lodestar" by Coya Conyon's memories of her grandfather Nicholas visiting her parents' home and half-burying her under presents from other planets.