Two Teams And Two Supernovas

As with Nicholas van Rijn's trade pioneer crew, a Coordination Service field team mixes species in order to avoid human beings getting on each other's nerves and to incorporate different perspectives.

The trade pioneer crew goes to Merseia to safeguard its population from the effects of a nearby supernova whereas Trevelyan and Smokesmith arrive on Good Luck after its population has already been destroyed by radiation from a nearby supernova.

The purpose of the trade pioneer crew is to make profits for the Solar Spice & Liquors Company whereas the purpose of the Coordination Service is to prevent exploitation. However, the trade pioneer crew leader, David Falkayn, sees so much exploitation that he decides to take measures against it. Trevelyan judges that the intact buildings on Good Luck should be preserved for study, not utilized as a ready made colony.

Trade Pioneer Crews II

I detoured from "Lodestar" to trade pioneer crews. We know that Falkayn's is not the only such crew. Chee Lan will join another when Falkayn's disbands. Before that, in "Lodestar" itself, we are told that:

"The crews maintained rendezvous stations."
-Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (New York, 2010), p. 642.

How many trade pioneer crews does Solar Spice & Liquors have and have other companies copied the idea? - assuming they have found out about it.

Coya Conyon writes a letter to Falkayn and gives it to a trustworthy trade pioneer bound for the same volume of space as Muddlin' Through. Either that pioneer will hear of Falkayn's team at a rendezvous station or he will leave the letter there to be collected. The rendezvous stations are described as "...turbulent..." (ibid.) Hundreds of robot probes explore thousands of planets on the hither side of the galactic frontier. A pioneer crew must be ready to hurry to any planet deemed promising by a probe - all the more so if other companies have by now adopted the same practice, although we are not told whether they have.

Events accelerate. We see Falkayn leading his team only twice before he has become:

"'...a target figure. Right-hand man and roving troubletwister for Old Nick.'" (p. 332)

Not just another Master Merchant leading a pioneer crew but right-hand man! And his role will become greater still. Eventually, he will:

found the Supermetals Company;
run SSL while van Rijn, traveling around in Muddlin' Through, does necessary damage limitation work throughout the League;
found a colony that will survive the Solar Commonwealth and defeat a fleet of the Terran Empire.

Today, Saturday, will be a day trip to Liverpool so maybe no blogging.

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.

Unpacking The Polesotechnic League Series

The Polesotechnic League series developed gradually and acquired substance before almost imperceptibly becoming part of a future history series outlasting the lives of individual characters. We appreciate the structure of the companion volumes, Trader To The Stars and The Trouble Twisters, because, whereas the first volume introduces Nicholas van Rijn, the second chronicles the early career of David Falkayn and shows two stages of Falkayn's approach to closer involvement with van Rijn. However, the six stories in these two collections do not present a chronologically linear sequence. In the first two Falkayn stories, the central character is still so young that these stories have to be set earlier than any of the three collected van Rijn stories. The third Falkayn story, "The Trouble Twisters," in which van Rijn appoints Falkayn to lead the first trade pioneer crew, is set immediately after the second collected van Rijn story, "Territory." A second story about the trade pioneer crew, "Day of Burning," is not included in The Trouble Twisters but is set before the third collected van Rijn story, "The Master Key."

And there are other complications. Another member of the trade pioneer crew, Adzel, first appears, in terms of fictional chronology, in "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" which falls between the original van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," and the first Falkayn story, "The Three-Cornered Wheel." And three other works, two of them featuring van Rijn, fall between the second Falkayn story, "A Sun Invisible," and the first Trader To To The Stars story, "Hiding Place." So it did make sense for Baen Books to republish the entire Technic History in chronological order of fictional events as The Technic Civilization Saga, compiled by Hank Davis.

The twelve works mentioned in this post do not themselves add up to a future history series but do make a significant contribution to it.

Texts In Contexts

A single text can bear different meanings not only to different readers but also to a single reader when read in a different context. Despite dissimilar contents, texts in differing contexts include the following:

in the Hebrew Bible, the Prophets immediately follow the Law and apply it to history, whereas, in the Christian Bible, they immediately precede the New Testament and prophesy the Messiah;

The Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion can be read either as a factual account of a secret meeting or as an insight into the mental processes of a conspiracy theorist;

I first read Poul Anderson's "The Game of Glory" without as yet any knowledge either that this story was part of a Dominic Flandry series or that that series was part of a future history series.

As I have said before, a prequel might not only be written later but also be meant to be read later. Readers like to be told what happened before. Thus:

having read about visits to Narnia, now we read about how such visits began;

having read an account of She, ending in her death, now we read Allan Quatermain's account of his earlier meeting with her;

having read Watson's accounts of Holmes' cases while they were together, now we read about Holmes' initiatory case before he met Watson;

having read about Nicholas van Rijn's trade pioneer crew, now we read about one team member's student days.

One text in three contexts:

"Adzel talks a lot about blessing in disguise, but this disguise was impenetrable."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic" IN Roger Elwood (Ed.), Future Quest (Avon Books, 1974).

"Adzel talks a lot about blessings in disguise, but this disguise was impenetrable."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 49-67 AT p. 51.

"Adzel talks a lot about blessings in disguise, but this disguise was impenetrable."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 177.

If we just read Future Quest, then "How To Be Ethnic" is just a one-off story.

If we are reading Anderson's Technic History in its original order of publication, then we have read about the trade pioneer crew, including Adzel, in "The Trouble Twisters," Satan's World and Mirkheim before reading "Adzel talks...," the opening words of "How To Be Ethnic...," whereas, if instead we are reading the Technic History in chronological order of fictitious events as presented in Baen Books' seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga, of which The Van Rijn Method is Volume I, then Adzel means nothing to us as yet when we read his name at the beginning of "How To Be Ethnic..." We will read about the trade pioneer crew later, in Volumes II and III, although only in the first of the six works collected in Vol III. History is bigger than organizations or civilizations.

So which is the better way to read it? Search me.

The Adventures Of The First Trade Pioneer Crew

There could have been a collection of stories about the missions of Nicholas van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew led by David Falkayn but Poul Anderson did not write his Technic History to any predictable formula. The only routine mission that we read about is the crew's first, recounted in Part III of The Trouble Twisters. When, in the original order of publication, we next read about the crew, in Satan's World, they have a number of such missions behind them but are now conducting a different kind of investigation within the Solar System. This investigation reveals a threat to Technic civilization which requires the direct involvement of van Rijn and also sends the members of the crew in different directions. At the end of this novel, the crew members are rich enough to stop pioneering but continue to do so anyway so their situation has fundamentally changed. Their next appearance, in Mirkheim, is set years after the crew has disbanded and the narrative has skipped over a period when van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, had joined the team. They are reassembled but for a different purpose. The Earth Book of Stormgate presents "Day of Burning," which recounts not a routine mission but an emergency rescue operation, and "Lodestar," which features van Rijn, Coya and the team but again does not describe any routine mission. And that is all there is. In "Day of Burning," Falkayn says that he has seen planets devastated by all-out nuclear strikes so he has seen a great deal that we have not been told about.

Trader Team

I still cannot re-read Anderson's Technic History without rethinking its subdivisions. It seemed obvious that the Trader Team sub-series comprised: "The Trouble Twisters" "Day of Burning" Satan's World "Lodestar" Mirkheim However, I now regard Mirkheim not as part of but as a sequel to the series as I will explain below. The Trader Team has three periods. The first starts with "The Trouble Twisters" and ends with Satan's World. Only one work, "Lodestar," is set in the second period and no works are set in the third period which we are told lasts for five years. After the third period, the team disperses and is temporarily reassembled for a different purpose only once three years later in Mirkheim. In "The Trouble Twisters," Nicholas van Rijn explains his "trade pioneer crew" idea to his protege David Falkayn and Falkayn leads one such crew on its first mission. The reader might expect the remaining installments of the series to recount further missions of this crew but instead we do not see them on such a mission ever again. They are engaged in different kinds of activities in the next two works: a rescue mission in "Day of Burning" and a different kind of investigation in Satan's World. In "Day of Burning," Falkayn states that he has seen planets devastated by nuclear strikes although visits to such planets would not be a usual activity for a pioneer crew. In Satan's World, their entire civilization is threatened. The team has to be split up and might not survive. Thus, this volume is a potential ending to the series. It ends with the team members rich for life but setting out again as a pioneer crew not because they have to but because they want to. That is why I say it ends their first period. In "Lodestar," the crew takes a few days off on a pleasant planet, then Falkayn seeks out and finds a source of wealth which he gives to the poorer races, not to the wealthy van Rijn: an end of innocence for the team. The story features van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya. In the third period, which we do not see, Coya has married Falkayn and joined the team. This period ends when the Falkayns start a family and stop pioneering and the team disperses. In Mirkheim, van Rijn reassembles the original team not to resume pioneering but to address an emergency which is the beginning of the end of the League period. Thus, Mirkheim is a sequel. I now think that omnibus collections of the League period of the Technic History should be: THE POLESOTECHNIC LEAGUE STAR TRADER TRADER TEAM LATTER DAYS IN THE LEAGUE Volume I would comprise seven stories introducing, apart from the League, the Jerusalem Catholic Church, Ythrians, Avalon, Adzel, van Rijn and Falkayn. Volume II is van Rijn. III is the team. IV would be Mirkheim preceded by two other stories set during the League period.

Trade Pioneer Crews

After Nicholas van Rijn has appeared in five installments of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization and David Falkayn has appeared in two, they finally appear together - although for less than three pages - but only so that van Rijn can explain to Falkayn, and thus also to the reader, why Falkayn, who has been first an apprentice, then a journeyman factor, and is now a Master Merchant, has also become the leader the first "trade pioneer crew." These crews are van Rijn's idea and I wonder whether they remain exclusive to his Solar Spice & Liquors Company?

Which of them initiated this interview, van Rijn or Falkayn? Van Rijn has been watching Falkayn since Ivanhoe. Falkayn says that he would like to open new sources and markets. But van Rijn points out that there is a lot competition on new planets discovered by the Polesotechnic League. However:

while visiting and colonizing interesting planets, space travelers have bypassed millions of others, many not even catalogued;
of these, statistics indicate that thousands are potential sources and markets;
so - choose a sector, establish a base, dispatch hundreds of automated probes and send a pioneer crew to any promising planets;
if the crew confirms that the prospect is promising, then they pave the way for commercial agreements and notify van Rijn;
three crew members of different species, a Master Merchant, a planetologist and a xenobiologist.

I could not have planned it better myself. In fact, I could not have planned it at all!

A Moment Of Realization On Ikrananka

"The Trouble Twisters."

"But wait!
"Excited, he sprang up." (III, p. 107)

Yet another moment of realization!

Solar Spice & Liquors needs a stable society on Ikrananka. The trade pioneer crew has arrived in the middle of a military stand-off that is a potential civil war. With superior armament, the crew can end the stand-off without killing anyone. Then, with League negotiation skills, they can arrange a truce and amnesty and the beginnings of regular off-planet trade.

The trade pioneer crew is led by a human being, David Falkayn, and the rebels are human beings, the Ershoka, but that does not prevent Falkayn from offering to end the stand-off. He has come for inter-species trade, not for any idea of racial solidarity or superiority, although he must persuade the young woman whom he has rescued of this.

Of course, the plot gets more complicated than that and Falkayn must display a van Rijnian ability to address everyone's interests before there can be a satisfactory resolution.

The Trader Team: Three Phases

The entire career of Nicholas van Rijn's original trade pioneer crew of David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan begins and ends within The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II, David Falkayn: Star Trader. Four instalments show just five incidents:

"The Trouble Twisters," Ikrananka

"Day of Burning," Merseia

Satan's World, Satan and the Shenna

"Lodestar," Tametha; Mirkheim

In true future historical style, this sub-series is interrupted by a contemporaneous account of van Rijn lounging on Earth while solving a problem on another planet, Cain:

"The Master Key"

- and by a second narrative recounting yet other events elsewhere in space:

"A Little Knowledge"

The entire career of the original team plus Coya Conyon/Falkayn occurs between one section of the Prologue and the opening chapter of the first Technic History instalment collected in Volume III. Falkayn reminisces about just two scenes from that period:

"...Coya beside him beholding the crooked towers of a city on a planet which did not yet have a human-bestowed name...

"Coya bringing him sandwiches and coffee when he sat far into a nightwatch studying the data readouts on a new world the ship was circling..."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT VI, p. 109.

The original team without Coya is reassembled just once and for a different purpose in Mirkheim. And that is our last sight of all these characters.

Between the disbandment of the crew that included Coya and the temporary emergency reassembly of the original crew, Chee Lan had joined another trade pioneer crew so there is another potential series.

Early Contacts And Their Eventual Consequences

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization: 

Hermes was discovered and colonized during the Breakup;

Woden and Cynthia were discovered and contacted very early, probably during the Breakup;

Ythri, Gray, Merseia, Paradox and Starkad were discovered during the first Grand Survey - and we do not know how many Grand Surveys there were.

Later:

Hermes, Woden and Cynthia are the home planets of the three members of Nicholas van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew;

although a few Wodenites win Polesotechnic League scholarships to go off-planet, most remain primitive hunters but then Woden joins Supermetals (see below);

one Cynthian trade route joins Technic civilization early but others later join Supermetals;

Ythri and Merseia become independent interstellar powers.

David Falkayn:

is born an aristocrat on Hermes;
works on Ivanhoe, Vanessa and Ikrananka, all of which later join Supermetals;
leads van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew;
in particular, leads the crew when it saves Merseia from supernova radiation;
discovers the supermetals-rich planet, Mirkheim;
founds the multi-species Supermetals Company that mines Mirkheim;
founds a joint human-Ythrian colony on Gray, renamed Avalon;
places Avalon under the protection of Ythri.

Thus, Falkayn alone connects most of the planets and species mentioned in this post.

Also discovered during the five year mission of the first Grand Survey:

the planet where Ali Hamid of the Olga died of a poisonous bite;
the planet where an excited club-wielding being fractured Manuel Gonsalves' skull;
many unique, mysterious, beautiful and terrible worlds blurring together in the explorers' minds only because they are so many.

Read Philip Jose Farmer's remark quoted on the front cover of The Earth Book Of Stormgate. (See image.)

The Trade Pioneer Crew

Poul Anderson, "The Trouble Twisters" IN David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 77-208.

The image shows Adzel, David Falkayn and Chee Lan (listed here in descending order of size).

These three team members and their ship's computer, Muddlehead, play poker. If we have been reading The Technic Civilization Saga consecutively, then we are meeting Falkayn for the third time, Adzel for the second time and the other two for the first time although we have previously read about Chee Lan's home planet, Cynthia. Originally, this was also Adzel's first appearance.

"The Three-Cornered Wheel" will also cameo Nicholas van Rijn, explaining his new trade pioneer crew concept to Falkayn. In a galactic sector that explorers have bypassed, SSL will establish a base and dispatch hundreds of cheap automatic craft to report on planetary surface conditions. Then the crew, one Master Merchant, one planetologist and one xenobiologists, all of different species, will further investigate promising planets and hopefully initiate commercial agreements for van Rijn to approve.

Falkayn will learn that they are a new breed, not troubleshooters but trouble twisters, twisting ghastly situations to their advantage. (XI, p. 206) The story of Falkayn's advancement from apprentice through journeyman to Master Merchant has been completed and a new series about "trouble twisters" begins.

Adzel

This year, Chinese New Year is Feb 16-18. For a previous year, see:

Adzel On Earth
China 

Lancaster will kick off with a Gala the previous Sunday, Feb 11, although, that weekend, I hope to be on retreat at Throssel Hole Buddhist Priory. See here.

Why do I mention these matters here? Because, among the International Brotherhood of Beings Who Are Fans Of Poul Anderson, both Chinese New Year and Buddhism remind us of Adzel.

When Nicholas van Rijn founded his first trade pioneer crew, we had already met the characters, van Rijn, David Falkayn and Adzel and had also read references to the planets, Hermes, Woden and Cynthia.The xenologist of the Olga, Vaughn Webner, had studied the trade-route cultures of Cynthia and James Ching knew of:

"...treetop highways under the golden-red sun of Cynthia!" (p. 183) (For full reference, see here.)

(Cynthia must have been discovered very early.)

This assumes that we have read the Technic History in the chronological order of fictitious events. Anyone reading the series in the order of its publication would notice that the references to inhabited planets were carefully written into stories set earlier but written later. In fact, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," about the Wodenite Adzel's student days on Earth, is an expansion of a passage in "The Trouble Twisters," that story about the founding of the trade pioneer crew.

Adzel, an alien convert to Buddhism who plays the dragon in Chinese New Year processions and Fafner in Siegfried, is a culturally significant character.

Fine Tuning The Chronology

See here and here.

Trying to fill in a bit more of the chronology:

2482  Satan episode
           Tametha uprising
           David Falkayn seeks and finds Mirkheim
2489  Supermetals begins trading
2492  Van Rijn repeats Falkayn's search
           Coya Falkayn joins the trade pioneer crew
2497  The trade pioneer crew disbands
2599  Knowledge of Mirkheim is made public
2500  The Babur War

I have started with Sean M Brooks' date of 2482 for the Satan episode and have added years in accordance with what is either said by the characters or stated by the omniscient narrator. Some of what is said suggests that my dating may be out by at most one year but no one gets down to specific months so this is the best that I can manage for the time being.

Addendum, 14 Jan '15: I have had to revise this Chronology because I got some details wrong, I don't know how. The data are:

Tametha and Falkayn's search happen shortly after the Satan episode;
van Rijn visits Mirkheim ten years after the Satan episode and three years after Supermetals starts;
David and Coya become linked when van Rijn is at Mirkheim;
Coya joins the team after marrying David;
the team disbands five years later;
Mirkheim becomes public knowledge one year before the Babur War;
the war happens eighteen years after David found Mirkheim.

The Two Reading Orders Revisited

When discussing the trade pioneer crew here, I referred to the original publication order of Poul Anderson's Technic History. I think that this publication order is worthy of preservation. It would give us perhaps seventeen volumes of which the first seven could be:

I Trader To The Stars

II The Trouble Twisters

III Satan's World

IV Mirkheim

V (The Saturn Game and other stories)

VI The People of the Wind

VII The Earth Book of Stormgate

That is already a substantial future history series yet it is less than half of the total. The brackets indicate that I include a proposed collection of three stories that do fit into this period but that had not been collected as such.

This reading order plunges in media res, into the midst of things, at the height, or even at the beginning of the decline, of the Polesotechnic League. An entire history of interplanetary and interstellar exploration and of the earlier careers of the leading characters has already happened. In fact, "The Saturn Game," the first seven of the twelve instalments collected in the Earth Book and the first two of the three instalments collected in The Trouble Twisters are all set earlier than the first of the three stories collected in Trader To The Stars! That is why Bean Books presents the Technic History in chronological order of fictitious events in the seven omnibus volumes of its The Technic Civilization Saga, compiled by Hank Davis.

(This is not a paid ad, just a factual summary.)

I turned back to these early volumes of the Technic History in order to check back through what we are told about the trade pioneer crew but that can wait. 

(A lot of superhero stuff on screen and in periodicals at Andrea's place this afternoon.)

More Van Rijnisms

Mirkheim, XIV.

The last two missions of the original trade pioneer crew, although not as a trade pioneer crew, are in Mirkheim. The first is a mission of inquiry and informal diplomacy to Babur on behalf of their employer, van Rijn. The second is a scouting expedition to Baburite-occupied Hermes. For this, Eric Tamarision has commissioned David Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan as officers of the Hermetian navy and given them one of his ships. Van Rijn's other comparably qualified staff are all Commonwealth citizens.

At the bottom of p. 199, van Rijn addresses Eric:

"'You is my son for sure, a chip off...'"

We think that we know what is coming. We turn the page:

"'...the old blockhead...'" (p. 200)

Further down that page:

"'...what has all this pile of maneuvers been for?'" (ibid.)

"...pile of maneuvers..." sounds familiar because it sounds like "pile of manure..."

On the following page:

"'The jeopardy cannot change its spots.'" (p. 201)

Van Rijn maintains this line of talk all the way to his memorable closing dialogue with Eric's mother in Chapter XXI when the novel unfortunately concludes.

Three Spaceships

Here is an exercise for a Poul Anderson fan. Compare the descriptions and abilities of Muddlin' Through, Hooligan and Jaccavrie:

the trade pioneer crew's spaceship with its consciousness-level computer, Muddlehead;

Dominic Flandry's private speedster;

the ship of a Commonalty Ranger, controlled entirely by a conscious computer.

(The phrase, "conscious computer," requires some discussion but we have been through this issue often enough before.)

Hooligan's abilities are summarized in A Stone In Heaven, VI. Jaccavrie appears only in "Starfog." Muddlin' Through is in every instalment that features Nicholas van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew. 

I am not going to do it. I have saddled myself with some other heavy reading because I think that it is necessary to clarify the mind-body problem as much as possible. The question can at least be clarified. My life began with received answers and approaches its end with questions. 

The Two Teams

Another parallel:

Nicholas van Rijn is the employer of the trade pioneer crew and becomes the grandfather-in-law of team leader, David Falkayn;

Dominic Flandry is the patron of the unnamed new team and the father of team member, Diana Crowfeather.

Van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, joined the trade pioneer crew on marrying Falkayn but there are no stories set during that period.

I think that we have to regard Targovi as the leader of the "new team" but we do not know what form the team would have taken if this subseries had continued which I wish it had.

Pairs Of Instalments

Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is so spacious and substantive that some of its species, individuals and institutions are introduced by a pair of instalments instead of just by a single instalment:

two stories about early human interactions with Ythrians, presenting first their biology, then their theology;

two contemporaneous stories introducing the Polesotechnic League with Adzel studying on Earth while Nicholas van Rijn runs Solar Spice & Liquors;

two stories about David Falkayn's career before he led van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew - first apprenticed to Martin Schuster, then working for SSL although not yet close to van Rijn;

two stories set on different continents of the planet Ivanhoe (one of them one of the Falkayn ones);

two stories about the trade pioneer crew, first on Ikranaka, then on Merseia;

two stories about the joint human-Ythrian colonization of the planet Avalon - first the Hesperian Islands, then the Coronan continent;

two 1952 pulp magazine stories about the proclamation, then the early expansion, of the Terran Empire;

two instalments about planets on the fringes of the Empire in Dominic Flandry's period;

two stories set during the period of recovery between the post-Imperial Long Night and the later civilizations spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy.

The Pivotal Role Of SATAN'S WORLD

OK. Reverting to the The Technic Civilization Saga reading order of Poul Anderson's Technic History, we reach Satan's World in the second half of Saga, Volume II. By now, we have read fifteen instalments of this future history series:

three pre-Polesotechnic League stories;

six instalments, including one novel, about Nicholas van Rijn;

one story about Adzel as a student on Earth long before he had joined van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew/trader team led by David Falkayn;

one story about Falkayn as an apprentice;

a second story about Falkayn, now working for van Rijn's Solar Spice & Liquors Company;

two stories about the trader team, the first cameoing van Rijn as he explains the new trade pioneer crew idea to Falkayn;

a sequel to the first Falkayn story but featuring a different group of League merchants.

In other words, already a comprehensive series so far. Satan's World seems at first to be a first trader team novel. In Chapters I-V, Adzel and Chee Lan wait in the Hotel Universe while Falkayn investigates Serendipity, Inc. However, matters become so grave that Adzel and Chee Lan must urgently contact van Rijn. Satan's World is the first of three instalments, two of them novels, that are equally about van Rijn and the trader team. Together with one remaining story about other League merchants, they complete the first major section of the Technic History.