NESFA Collections Vol 1

At last I am reading the NESFA Press The Collected Short Works of Poul Anderson, Vol 1, Call Me Joe (Framingham, MA, 2009), although I suspect that I have already read the best of its contents.

The table of contents fills a page but this turns out to be because many of the items are not short stories but short(er) verses. We recognize poems that, apparently, were published in Staves first but then were incorporated into novels. "Heinlein's Stories" is a comic verse, not, as I had hoped and expected, a serious article.

There is a page of haikus. I think that Anderson wrote the perfect haiku in his later novel, Genesis:

"The shadows, like life,
"Moved beneath summer daylight.
"Evening reclaims them."

There is a kind of sf hero who manipulates entire societies with clever schemes. These include James Blish's John Amalfi and an obnoxious extra-solar alien in Anderson's "The Helping Hand."

At last I have read "The Martian Crown Jewels," although I prefer the original Sherlock Holmes as he appears in "Time Patrol." At last also I have read the first of the three Wing Alak stories:

"The Double-Dyed Villains" (1949);
"Enough Rope" (1953);
"The Live Coward" (1956).

(I was born in 1949 and started to attend boarding school in 1956.)

Strangely, the first of these stories incorporates the titles of the second and third stories as phrases in its text. (p. 161) This short trilogy deserves its own volume with the title League Patrol. Some of Anderson's characters work for organizations with diverse purposes:

the Time Patrol guards human history;
the Coordination Service guards the Stellar Union;
the League Patrol guards the Galactic League;
the Polesotechnic League makes a profit but spreads civilization in the process;
Naval Intelligence guards the Terran Empire.

Blish wrote about comparable organizations:

the Colonization Council "seeds" the galaxy;
Okie cities "pollinate" the galaxy;
Traitors' Guilds exchange intelligence and disinformation between interstellar powers;
the Service guards an expanding, intergalactic civilization.

Both the Time Patrol and the Service work with time: the Patrol studies and preserves the past whereas the Service receives messages from and guards the future.

Why are "Time Patrol" and two Technic History stories in this collection when they are already collected with the rest of their respective series? Why include so many of the non-series time travel stories when most of these are in Past Times which deserves to be revised and republished?

Ace Double

A few more details that may be of interest about Poul Anderson's Ace Double comprising The Makeshift Rocket ("A Bicycle Built For Brew") and Un-Man and other novellas, the "others" being "Margin of Profit" and "The Live Coward." Anyone familiar with Anderson's works recognizes that "Un-Man" and "Margin of Profit" each belong to a different future history series but closer investigation reveals that "The Live Coward" also belongs to a series. It is one of three stories about Wing Alar of the Galactic League Patrol: neither the Polesotechnic League nor the Time Patrol but the League Patrol. These stories, of which two are in Kinship With The Stars, should form a single volume.

Rocket presents a fifth fictitious Martian race. (We had four before.) I think this fifth race is also in "Captive of the Centaurianess" but will confirm by rereading. Rocket also has gyro-gravitic asteroid colonization, familiar from The Flying Mountains.

After Genius

I had definitely not read Poul Anderson's "Genius" before and it is an interesting story. After it in the NESFA Press The Collected Short Works Of Poul Anderson (Framingham MA, 2009), there are:

"The Live Coward"
"Time Lag"
"The Man Who Came Early"
"Turning Point"
"The Alien Enemy"
"Enough Rope"
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Welcome"
"Flight to Forever"
"Barnacle Bull"
"Time Heals"
"The Martian Crown Jewels"
"Prophecy"
"Kings Who Die"
"Starfog"

I had already read all but three of these works and have quickly read the rather lackluster "The Martian Crown Jewels" since acquiring the book so there is not much left before Vol 2, which I have yet to order. However, the remaining stories will be read and commented on.

Despite their exotic interstellar settings, "The Helping Hand" and "Genius" are serious discussions of how societies develop. I thought that I had finished comparing Isaac Asimov unfavorably with Poul Anderson but here again Anderson presents a more interesting account of a ruling group applying to society a mathematically formulated, predictive science of society. Station Seventeen, secretly directing the Empire, is like a Second Foundation but based on intelligence, not on hypnosis.

The geniuses of Station Seventeen, which is an entire planet, are intelligent, perceptive and cooperative enough to share socially necessary menial tasks equally among their entire population rather than relegating a social majority to lifetimes of drudgery. Mass-production will have to wait until mechanical knowledge is sufficient to develop entirely automatic factories because "'...few if any geniuses could stand to work on an assembly line all day.'" (p. 212) However, they "'...are in no hurry to advance their standard of living.'" (ibid.)

Production has, perhaps, four stages:

hunting and gathering;
horticulture and agriculture;
manufacturing, eventually industrialized;
automation.

In our history, the second and third stages necessitated social stratification and competition whereas the eventual production of abundance should make stratification and competition redundant. The geniuses manage every stage of production without either stratification or competition.

A society of geniuses has super geniuses who are as far beyond the ordinary mind as logic is beyond instinct. The surprise ending is a real surprise but also logical. The geniuses have already outwitted the Imperial social experimenters.

Occasional raiders from the Magellanic Clouds are also a neat idea.

The Early Van Rijn Stories II

The CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION in The Technic Civilization Saga wrongly states that Poul Anderson's "The Master Key" was published in 1971. This is impossible because it was collected in Trader To The Stars, which was published in 1964.

In 1960, John W. Campbell changed the title of the Astounding sf magazine to Analog Science Fiction & Fact. Thus, ASF can mean the same magazine both before and after the name change.

In ASF
"Margin of Profit," September, 1956.
"The Man Who Counts," February-April, 1958.
"Hiding Place," March, 1961.
"Territory," June, 1963.
"The Master Key," 1964.
"Esau," February, 1970.

Collections
Un-Man And Other Novellas (1962)
"Un-Man" (Psychotechnic History)
"Margin of Profit" (unrevised ASF version)
"The Live Coward" (Wing Alak series)

Trader To The Stars (1964)
"Hiding Place"
"Territory"
"The Master Key"

The Earth Book Of Stormgate (1978)
- collects twelve Technic History installments, including:
"Margin of Profit" (revised)
"Esau"
The Man Who Counts

The Technic Civilization Saga, (seven volumes, 2009-2012)
- collects the entire Technic History in chronological order, including revised versions if appropriate.

A Novel (with changing title)
War Of The Wing-Men (1958)
The Man Who Counts (1978)
The Earth Book Of Stormgate-2 (1980) 

Thus, this van Rijn novel was republished both in a collection and as a discrete volume in a single year, 1978.

Van Rijn appears in eleven works by Poul Anderson, including ten Technic History installments.

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.)

Collections II

In a recent post, I listed fourteen non-series Poul Anderson collections found on a shelf at home. Needless to say, a few more have since come to light:

Fantasy, but that is a bit different because it is mainly fantasy, not sf;

Winners, but that does have a point - five Hugo winners (two of them also belong in different future history collections);

an Ace Double of The Makeshift Rocket and Un-Man and other novellas.

the Un-Man collection contains:

"Un-Man," which belongs in the Psychotechnic future history;

"Margin of Profit," which belongs in the Technic History;

"The Live Coward," which is in at least one of the fourteen collections already mentioned.

Thus, Un-Man and other novellas has no right to exist as a separate collection!

Another complication is that Conquests, already mentioned, was originally published as Seven Conquests. These are not two collections with similar titles but one collection with different titles. There is a great need for Poul Anderson's short story collections to be uniformly rationalized.

Later: Sorry, Conquests was not already mentioned. Conflict was. You see how confusing it gets. I would have listed those two titles beside each other. They both contain "Kings Who Die" and "Details." Each also has one that belongs in a future history collection. Conquests also contains "Wildcat" that is, rightly, in the time travel collection, Past Times. Thus, Conquest's seven stories could be reduced to three - and I am sure that, of those, "Inside Straight" is in one or even two of the fourteen listed collections.

Still Later: And The Makeshift Rocket is "A Bicycle Built For Brew" which is in one or two of the collections so that entire Ace Double is redundant.

Relevant Late Night Other Reading

"'I'm not recruiting dead heroes, I prefer live cowards.'"

-Len Deighton, Horse Under Water (Dublin, 2021), 11, p. 44.

I mention this here only because Deighton's anonymous hero echoes a Poul Anderson title, "The Live Coward," to which I have at least referred here although I remember nothing of the story.

Now I must return to other reading, hopefully not to be diverted back to the blog again this evening. Some time tomorrow. And I might feel alternative histories calling me away from future histories. But you never know. 

Old Saying

Conan: Blood Of The Serpent, 22.

"'Old saying,' [Irawagbon] went on in her basic Stygian. 'Brave die once, coward many time.'

"[Conan] nodded, familiar with it. Versions of that were present in every language and land he'd ever encountered." (p. 260)

Quiz question: Where does James Bond say this? I thought that it was in conversation with Kissy Suzuki in You Only Live Twice but have not found it there. Maybe Thunderball? I have read it recently but then I have reread the complete Bond canon recently.

Conan is now involved in a side-adventure with this other woman, Irawagbon. We know, in any case, that Valeria can take care of herself. We expect Conan's deflected quest to resume in good time. The narrative proceeds at a steady pace.