Various Editions And Titles

In England and maybe in some other places, when someone makes a factual statement, then realizes that he has been mistaken and immediately corrects himself, he sometimes says, "I tell a lie," although obviously it is not a lie if it was a mistake and is immediately corrected. I wrote it in EARTH BOOK And SAGA when, having written that I possessed Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts only in the omnibus collections, The Earth Book Of Stormgate and The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, The Van Rijn Method, but not as a single volume, I then found a British paperback edition of War Of The Wing-Men (alternative title) on a bookshelf upstairs. Now, while looking for something else, I find War Of The Wing-Men as one half of an Ace Double, the other half being Anderson's The Snows Of Ganymede, thus a Technic History novel and a Psychotechnic History novel in a single volume. These two future history series had not yet been collected in their own rights.

The Man Who Counts also exists, although not in my possession, as a single volume with its correct title - Anderson neither chose nor liked War Of The Wing-Men - and as The Earth Book Of Stormgate-2 in a three-volume paperback edition of this collection.

We also find the two future histories in a single Ace Double as follows. One half is The Makeshift Rocket, a non-series story. The other half, Un-Man and other novellas collects:

"Un-Man" (Psychotechnic History);

"Margin of Profit" (Nicholas van Rijn/Polesotechnic League/Technic History);

"The Live Coward" (Wing Alak of the Galactic League Patrol).

Complicated, you must agree.

(Putting books back on the shelf, I realize that I have two copies of the Ace Double with Un-Man and other novellas.)