Returns

Every time a new story is published about an old character, that character has returned to print in the most basic sense of "return." Of course we do not call it a "return" every time although the word might have been adapted in that way: "Have you read the latest 'return' of (fill in the blank)?" Usually, "The Return of -" is a portentous title used only on special occasions as when a character has not been published for a very long time or when Sherlock Holmes returned from apparent death which his author had intended to be an actual death.

The opening story in the Return... collection explains that Holmes had faked his death. But the real "return," in the sense in which I am using the word here, had been The Hound Of The Baskervilles, a novel serialized in the Strand magazine and explained as occurring before the (still supposedly real) death.

In this sense, Poul Anderson presents some superb "returns." If we read his Technic History in its original book publication order, then we begin with the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy which culminates in and concludes with the chronologically last League narrative, Mirkheim, in which all the by now familiar characters make their goodbyes. After that, the History proceeds to a later period when there is both a Terran Empire and a human-Ythrian colony planet, Avalon. However, one Avalonian compiles a history of earlier events and, in that history, the Earth Book, all the familiar League characters "return," though not of course from death. But we see them alive again in chronologically earlier stories and what could be better?