Last year, while at the Chinese New Year concert, I was wondering which work by Poul Anderson to reread and post about next and decided on
The Boat Of A Million Years, a gratifyingly lengthy read that would certainly consume more time than any single short story.
Boat is a past and future history. Aliens, time travellers, mutants or immortals in the past make for historical science fiction and Anderson covers all these options in different works. The protagonists of
Boat are mutant immortals like Robert Heinlein's Lazarus Long. Although we are not supposed to make comparisons between works with different purposes, a long series like the Technic History is so much more satisfying than even the lengthiest single novel. In the Technic History, we read short stories like "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," novels like
The People Of The Wind and even a trilogy of novels,
Young Flandry, which in turn is just one of seven volumes in
The Technic Civilization Saga. I can return to instalments of the Technic History more often than to chapters of
Boat.Now it really is time to move.
1 comment:
You're right, the Technic History is impressive -- and the more so because the Empire and the League periods were tied together more or less on a whim.
That made it more like real history, which isn't 'smooth'.
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