Picking Up The Threads

Where were we? I was reading Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's third Man-Kzin Wars story, "In The Hall Of The Mountain King," realizing that I had not read it before. Pournelle's and Stirling's Man-Kzin trilogy is integrated with Poul Anderson's and I will probably reread the latter next.

However, when the laptop died, I temporarily stopped reading the Man-Kzin series becaue I had stopped being able to blog about it simultaneously. Also, wanting a change of genre, I instead reread Garth Ennis' graphic series, The Boys, which ingeniously integrates the fantastic concept of superheroes into an alternative twentieth century history of American business, politics and warfare. The Twin Towers still stand but not the Brooklyn Bridge. 9/11 happened but differently.

Ennis knows his comic book stuff and his real world stuff and also writes a lot of straight war fiction. Although he presents different genres in a different medium from the different perspective of an Ulsterman living in New York, Ennis' graphic fictions are comparable to Anderson's, Pournelle's and Stirling's militray sf - and he even wrote some sf in a Dan Dare revival. Common themes are military hardware, the experience of combat and the causes of conflicts. What more could we want?

Well, I would like an end to such conflicts but even then we would still have to study and read about military history. Larry Niven's ARM are out of order trying to suppress that history. The FTL interstellar scenarios of Anderson, Niven, Pournelle etc would at least ensure that humanity can survive even when weapons can wreck worlds.

Next, we must return to the Wars Against Men.

The Two Man-Kzin Wars Trilogies

I am realizing that I have not read Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's "In the Hall of the Mountain King" before. At least, it is not raising any memories. (In Man-Kzin Wars V, this story is "In the Hall..." on the contents and title pages but "The Hall..." on the tops of pages.)

The present plan is to finish reading this story. Over 100 pages to go: it is really a novel. It is interesting as a well-written installment of a future history and as overlapping with Poul Anderson's contributions to the same future history. I will probably reread Anderson's Man-Kzin trilogy in order to trace its connections with the Pournelle-Stirling trilogy. In any case, I have read Anderson's third Man-Kzin story only once so far, which is not enough.

These six works make a good series in their own right and as a turning point in Larry Niven's Known Space future history. Like Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Known Space divides into an STL and an FTL period. Niven shows STL interstellar warfare in Protector. Anderson shows such warfare, but only between two nearby planetary systems, in "Time Lag." The nature of man-kzin conflict changes dramatically when men acquire the hyperdrive at the end of the second Pournelle-Stirling story.

I may or may not read Man-Kzin Wars stories by other authors. The focus of this blog remains Poul Anderson and related writers, not Known Space, which is a whole other subject.