Monday 6 November 2017

Times And Places

In The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II (see here), time passes, although not in this volume on a historical scale, and we also learn of approximately simultaneous events in different places: van Rijn is in Chicago Integrate while his trade pioneer crew is on Merseia and others are elsewhere. Thus, this volume makes a solid contribution to the Technic History. When we want to read about historical changes covering more than a single lifetime, then we can turn to Vol I, stretching from the twenty first century to the Polesotechnic League, or to Vol III, extending from the League to the Empire - and these are only three of seven volumes. As a matter of fact, after the Terran Empire, there are three further periods of the Technic History:

the Long Night;
the Allied Planets;
a time of human civilizations in several spiral arms, one arm served by "the Commonalty" -

- and maybe a fourth period corresponding to the "Galactic Archaeology Society" mentioned in the Introduction to "The Star Plunderer," although no installments of the History are set in this later Galactic period. However, as readers of the series know, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the remaining four volumes and the remaining four or so periods! The Terran Empire in the lifetime of Dominic Flandry fills most of the remaining volumes.

The stories in Robert Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth are meant to be approximately contemporaneous, set about 2000. See Meanwhile. Thus, here again, although this collection contributes to the Future History, longer term historical changes are to be found in the preceding and succeeding volumes. Anderson's Psychotechnic and Technic future histories are Heinleinian in structure but vaster in scope.

6 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Strictly speaking, Anderson's four post-Imperial stories are also post-TECHNIC. As Roan Tom says at the beginning of "A Tragedy Of Errors," civilization had fallen with the Fall of the Empire and CRASHED almighty hard! The later civilizations we see in THE NIGHT FACE, "The Sharing Of Flesh," and "Starfog," were different civilizations, successors of the Technic.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
That suggests a different way of packaging the series:
THE HISTORY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION ends with THE GAME OF EMPIRE;
the remaining volume, regarded as a sequel and designed to look different, is entitled THE POST-TECHNIC CIVILIZATIONS.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Hmmm, THE POST-TECHNIC CIVILIZATIONS? I like it. Or could we go with THE POST IMPERIAL CIVILIZATIONS?

And I continue to argue such a volume should contain as an appendix the original texts of the five Technic stories Anderson revised or incorporated into a novel.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
I might prefer those five stories in a separate volume but I agree that they should be collected together and published.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I suggested including the original text of the five stories Anderson revised with THE POST-TECHNIC/THE POST IMPERIAL CIVILIZATIONS because I don't think the four post-Technic stories would make QUITE a large enough volume by itself.

Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

My view is Robert Heinlein's Future History could have rivaled the works of Poul Anderson if he could have taken philosophy and religion as seriously as did the latter writer. That would have added depth, solidity, and meaning to his writing. Instead, we get only dreary, tedious ramblings in RAH's later works about sex and incest.

We do see some interesting uses made of religion by Heinlein in SIXTH COLUMN. Even if it was only a fake religion cooked up by an American resistance movement subverting a conquest of the US by a "Greater Asia."

Sean