Wednesday 9 July 2014

Multiverse And A Roland Trilogy

Greg Bear and Gardner Dozois, Editors, Multiverse: Exploring Poul Anderson's Worlds (Burton, MI, 2014).

 Poul Anderson's Rustum History is eight stories about the colonization of the extrasolar planet Rustum that could be collected in one volume. "The Queen of Air and Darkness," set on the colony planet Roland, refers to Rustum so is part of the same future history and could, for completeness, be included as a ninth item in the Rustum collection.

Or a one-volume Rustum History could now be followed by a one-volume Roland Trilogy, containing:

"The Queen of Air and Darkness" by Poul Anderson;
"Outmoded Things" by Nancy Kress;
"The Fey of Cloudmoor" by Terry Brooks.

The two sequels are in Multiverse. They perform the role of sequels by logically deducing what might have happened next:

the rescued children need therapy;
some want to return to the wild from which they were rescued;
an electromagnetic screen guards a town against the "Rollies'" telepathy;
some young people are able to accept the telepathically induced images as neither lies nor delusions but  meaningful fictions;
it is not easy to persuade the colonists to give up their superstitions and regard the natives scientifically;
the natives have learned how to defend themselves against armed men in vehicles;
the man who was the rescued boy has not adjusted back into human society and returns to the wild; 
he seems to give his baby daughter to his mother but has given her a changeling;
human society is decaying, maybe to be replaced by a human-native synthesis.

No comments: