Starting "Security"

I have started into "Security" but it is not grabbing me yet and I will probably leave it aside till tomoz. I want to get back to The Hound Of The Baskervilles before midnight.

Like Simon Arch in "Snowball," Allen Lancaster works with dielectric polarization. The difference is that Lancaster lives in a future interplanetary period when society and science are subject to "Security." (James Blish's They Shall Have Stars is about security stifling science but secret scientific projects finding an escape route.)

Palpable fear of Security, retroactively reedited public propaganda and a new phonetic orthography all make Lancaster's milieu sound 1984-esque although its technology is more advanced. (I think that the 1984 regime will grind to a halt through lack of research.)

Security will replace Lancaster with a double while he works on a top secret project for them so we will find out what that is next time or of course blog readers might read the story online first.

Why do these obscure early short stories have so many different cover illustrations? What a strange new perspective we are gaining on Poul Anderson's works. I am wondering how to escape back to the continuity and the greater substantiality of the same author's Technic History.