Tuesday 13 March 2018

The Technic History Saga Page Count

In my possession:

The Van Rijn Method (small format), 619 pp. + short excerpt from Young Flandry;

David Falkayn: Star Trader (small), 692 pp.

Rise Of The Terran Empire (small), 672 pp.

Young Flandry (large format), 526 pp.

Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (large), 405 pp.

Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (small), 616 pp.

Flandry's Legacy (small), 804 pp. + short excerpt from War Maid's Choice by David Weber.

Observations

I would have preferred all small but that is how they came from Waterstones Bookshop.
Presumably the Saga was divided up the way it was mainly for reasons of approximately uniform volume size.
I have repeatedly discussed how I think the Technic History should be divided up between volumes.
Now I am looking in more detail at how Baen Books (Compiler: Hank Davis) have in fact done it.
Thus, Sir Dominic Flandry... comprises:

"The Plague of Masters"
"Hunters of the Sky Cave"
"The Warriors from Nowhere"
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows

I think of these four works as the last two installments of the Captain Flandry series and the first two installments of the "Children of Empire" sequence and I might also have rearranged the order of the Captain Flandry series.

But Baen Books have done the job and it is unlikely to be re-edited any time soon.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I have agreed with some of your suggestions on how best to "package" the Technic Civilization stories. My view is that the four post-Imperial stories should be in a separate volume, along with the original texts of the stories revised or incorporated by Anderson in a larger work: "Margin of Profit," "The White King's War," "Tiger By The Tail," "Honorable Enemies," and "The Warriors From Nowhere."

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Such a volume would be AFTERMATH AND ALTERNATIVES.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would favor titling such a volume THE POST IMPERIAL AGE. With the original texts of the stories Anderson revised as an Appendix.

Sean