Colorful Fiction

Like a lot of people, I enjoy novels, films and comics, thus verbal, audiovisual and visual-verbal fiction. Films and comics have the advantage of full color visuals but prose fiction can be "colorful." First, it generates book covers and each new edition of a text can have a different cover.

Secondly, the writing can be "colorful." Many of Poul Anderson's descriptive passages are multi-sensory. We see, hear and smell a scene.

Chee Lan, a member of Anderson's "Trader Team" is squirrel-like, small with a large tail and white-furred except for a black nose and a dark mask around golden or green eyes. Thus, not only is she described colorfully. She also resembles a member of the DC Comics Green Lantern Corps, pictured lower left.

To complete the resemblance, Chee flies with a gravity harness in "Day Of Burning" and she and her team mates engage flying soldiers in a forest on another planet in Mirkheim. The Trader Team and the Green Lantern Corps, both interstellar multi-species outfits, differ in almost every respect. However, by basing an extraterrestrial on a terrestrial life form, Anderson and a comics script writer have generated visually similar characters.   

A Non-Linear Sub-Series

The "Trader Team" sub-series in Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization comprises just five works. In the first, "Trader Team"/"The Trouble Twisters," Nicholas van Rijn explains his trade pioneer crew idea to David Falkayn:

robot probes will investigate as yet unexplored planetary systems that have been bypassed by the frontier of known space;
a crew comprising a Master Merchant, a planetologist and a xenobiologist of different species will visit any that seem promising.

In this story, Falkayn leads his team on their first mission and coins a term for their new profession, "trouble twister." (1)

It might be expected that the remaining four works would describe four more missions but they don't. On the one hand, we are to understand that Falkayn's and other teams enrich van Rijn by continuing to pioneer for several decades. On the other hand, the remaining works present different kinds of events that are turning points for the team, for their civilization or for both.

In the second work, "Day Of Burning," the team is not pioneering but is on a rescue mission simply because theirs was the nearest League ship to the planet Merseia when a threat to all life on that planet was detected. Falkayn claims to have seen planets devastated by all-out nuclear strikes. That must have happened between stories and would not have been on a pioneer crew mission. This story is a turning point for Technic civilization because the Merseians later become the main adversaries of the Polesotechnic League's successor, the Terran Empire.

 In the third work, Satan's World, the team is on yet another kind of mission, investigating a data processing company based in the Solar System where, because of exploits that we have not read about, Falkayn is known to be:

"Right-hand man and roving troubletwister for Old Nick." (2)

(Falkayn's coinage has become a single word.)

This novel is a turning point for Technic civilization because it shows that the Polesotechnic League could be vulnerable to external threats which, in turn, is a prelude to recognition of internal threats to the League's continued prosperity and stability. The novel is a potential ending for the series: the team has to be split up and might not survive, as indeed Technic civilization might not. When, at the very end, they have defeated their enemies and are embarking on a new pioneering mission, things have changed. They have passed a turning point. Their share in Satan's World has made them rich for life. They now pioneer because they want to, not because they have to. In that sense, the first phase of their troubletwisting career has ended.

And this sub-series could have ended there. However, Anderson next wrote "Lodestar," based on an idea suggested by his editor John W Campbell, for a John W Campbell Memorial Anthology. The team visits an established League base. Thereafter, the story follows van Rijn and his granddaughter, Coya, who finally discover that Falkayn and his team have secretly worked against van Rijn's business interests in order to help the poorer rational species whose needs are ignored by the League. This is a turning point for the League, for the relationship between van Rijn and Falkayn and, we later learn, for the relationship between Coya and Falkayn who have married and started a family by the time of the fifth and last work in this sub-series, Mirkheim.

Arguably, the sub-series proper ends with "Lodestar." That is the last time we see Falkayn's team during that period of their employment by van Rijn. Mirkheim, set many years later, is a sequel in which, during many other epochal events, van Rijn reassembles the long dispersed original team but for a different kind of mission and in very different circumstances. We learn that Coya had married Falkayn and joined the team for five years but stopped pioneering when they started a family and that that had ended the team, with its members going their separate ways. Thus, there is another entire period, of Coya on the team, which is not covered by any of the stories.

As part of a longer history, the sub-series is also rich in both prequels and sequels that tell us what van Rijn and some of the team members did both before and after this period. But my point here is that Anderson, having defined the role of a trade pioneer crew, does not present merely a linear series about successive exploits of such a team. Taking it as given that they had such exploits, he instead paints a broader picture by spacing his stories out through time to show us what happened to the League throughout an entire historical period.

For what it is worth, I now think that the entire Technic History could best be collected as:

The Polesotechnic League (9 works);
Star Traders (9);
League And Empire (6);
Young Flandry (3);
Flandry And Empire (9);
Children Of Empire (3);
Long Night And Dawn (4).

It is possible to rethink this issue endlessly and to keep arriving at different conclusions. The problems are where to divide the omnibus volumes and what to call them. Van Rijn dominates his period, appearing not only in six works of his own but also in four of the five "Trader Team" works. Thus, the proposed Star Traders volume would, with the exception of "Day Of Burning," be an extended van Rijn series but with a pluralized title, Star Traders, not Star Trader, in order to acknowledge that this volume covers Falkayn and the team as well as Old Nick.

Again, Mirkheim's status as really a sequel to the Trader Team sequence could be acknowledged by placing it at the beginning of the following volume which would therefore be called League And Empire, not Avalon And Empire. Near the end of Mirkheim, Coya bears Nicholas Falkayn who addresses his son in the very next story set in the Falkayns' colony on the planet Avalon and this omnibus volume ends with Avalon resisting the Empire. Thus, League And Empire would be an appropriate title as showing not interaction (they do not coexist) but transition between the Polesotechnic League, beginning its decline in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim, and the Terran Empire, becoming territorially aggressive in The People Of The Wind.

(1) Anderson, Poul, David Falkayn: Star Trader (compiled by Hank Davis), New York, 2010, p. 206.
(2) ibid., p. 332.

Baen and Beyond

The Technic Civilization Saga published by Baen is a well presented series. I do not always agree with the way the volumes are divided up but I suppose they have to be of comparable length? Rise of the Terran Empire and Young Flandry are appropriate titles for omnibus volumes. Influenced by the Baen editions, I now propose the following way to present the series:

The History of Technic Civilization

The Earth Book of Stormgate: Expanded Edition
I Beginnings and Nicholas van Rijn
II Trader Team and Latter Days

The Terran Empire
III Rise of the Terran Empire
IV Young Flandry
V Flandry and Empire
VI Children of Empire

VII After the Empire

Rise of the Terran Empire must describe the pre-Flandry Empire in conflict with Avalonians including members of the Stormgate choth so this is an intermediate volume, both a sequel to the Earth Book and a prequel to Young Flandry. Similarly, After the Empire is both a sequel to the Terran Empire and, potentially, a prequel to subsequent history. If Anderson can write in Valhalla...

Introductions and Developments

The opening six stories of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation introduce:

two organisations that will be important later, the Jerusalem Catholic Church and the Polesotechnic League;
the version of hyperspace to be used in this series;
two species that will be important later, winged Ythrians and dinosauroid Wodenites;
two less prominent species, inhabitants of Ivanhoe and extra-solar colonists of Mars;
three individuals who will be important later, the Wodenite Adzel and the human beings Nicholas van Rijn and David Falkayn;
the "Grand Survey" discoverers of other planets that will be re-visited later;
one planet, not yet named Avalon, that will be important later.

Thus, half a dozen short stories introduce a dozen aspects of the series. These six works are followed by:

five about van Rijn of the League;
six in which Falkayn works for van Rijn (in five, he leads a Trader Team including Adzel);
two further stories set during the League period;
two stories about the joint human-Ythrian colony on Avalon founded by Falkayn;
two stories introducing a third important organisation, the Terran Empire, rising from the ruins of the League;
one novel about Avalonian resistance to the Empire;
many volumes about the Empire and its opponents, the Merseians, who were introduced in a Trader Team story;
a last Empire-Merseians novel in which the Wodenite Axor has, like Adzel, converted to a Terrestrial religion, in this case Jerusalem Catholicism;
four works set in three different periods after the Empire.

It is remarkable that the History continues indefinitely, as it seems, through several successive, developing stages. The overall story goes somewhere. Seeds planted earlier grow later and sometimes flower later again. Narratives intersect, eg, Avalon and Empire, but there are others. Every end is a new beginning. However much is told, there is always more that could have been. The very last story potentially initiates a new sequence about a later form of interstellar organisation. The entire series is the longest most substantial single author future history in science fiction.

How To Package The Technic History

After considerable re-reading and reflection, I think I have found the perfect titles, and by implication contents, for omnibus collections of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilisation:

THE POLESOTECHNIC LEAGUE
STAR TRADER
TRADER TEAM
AVALON AND EMPIRE
YOUNG FLANDRY
OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE
FLANDRY AND EMPIRE
CHILDREN OF EMPIRE
AFTER THE EMPIRE

OUTPOSTS OF EMPIRE would comprise only "Outpost of Empire" and The Day Of Their Return. The Terran Empire is successfully resisted in the first but not in the second. The Day Of Their Return, about a potential jihad originating on an inhospitable but colonized planet, is comparable to but more plausible and substantial than Frank Herbert's better known, twice dramatized, Dune.

CHILDREN OF EMPIRE would contain the three novels featuring sons and daughters of four characters, including Dominic Flandry, who were introduced in the first of the three YOUNG FLANDRY novels. Thus, the Technic History would have two solid concluding volumes, one for the Empire period and another for the series as a whole.

At the end of TRADER TEAM, van Rijn, title character of STAR TRADER, and Falkayn, the leader of van Rijn's Trader Team, anticipating the decline of the Polesotechnic League, begin preparations that will bear fruit on the planet Avalon whereas, at the end of CHILDREN OF EMPIRE, the post-Imperial "Long Night," although foreseen, remains more remote - two of the "Children" are about to embark on new adventures. For both League and Empire, a single significant narrative emerges from the diverse individual stories and novels.

Anderson was able to spread his story lavishly over many volumes yet still to leave major questions unanswered or even unasked. Flandry's opponent Aycharaych may have been killed at the end of A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows (CHILDREN OF EMPIRE I), yet it is hinted that he might still be around in The Game Of Empire (CHILDREN OF EMPIRE III). I accept that Aycharaych's species, the Chereionites, were the Ancients but where did they go and what does Aycharaych do after his disappearance? During the Empire period, the Merseians sought to destroy and supplant the Terran Empire. Why do they seem no longer to be around after the Fall of the Empire? Did Aycharaych do something to thwart their schemes? After earlier events, he might have been motivated to do so and might also have been even more successful than Flandry.