Barriers To Understanding

"The Sharing of Flesh" is included in three Technic History collections:

The Long Night

The Night Face and other stories

Flandry's Legacy

Of these, I possess only The Long Night and Flandry's Legacy. This story has no introduction in Flandry's Legacy. The story is set long after Hloch - fictitiously - compiled The Earth Book Of Stormgate. Therefore, it not only does not have but also could not have had any introduction composed by Hloch.

Like Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, The Long Night includes italicized interstitial passages composed not by the author of the stories, Poul Anderson, but by Andersonian scholar, Sandra Miesel. The short paragraph that immediately precedes "The Sharing of Flesh" could serve as an introduction both to The Night Face and to "The Sharing of Flesh."

After referring to "...rediscovery expeditions during the next four centuries...," Miesel comments:

"Time and again, these contact teams would find that simple ignorance was the least of the barriers to mutual understanding."

-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Long Night (New York, 1983), p. 202.