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DESCENT INTO EMPIRE

The third volume of the Technic Civilization saga is centered around a major faultline in the series' future history; "interesting times," as the famous Chinese curse phrases it. There is darkness, disaster, and tragedy. But there are also men and women fighting the darkness, enduring through tragedy, striving to bring light back to the human worlds.

The series was written by Poul Anderson, after all . . .

The Commonwealth was no utopia, but it had a measure of political freedom. The Polesotechnic League was no confederation of saints, but its members (for their own benefit, of course) were a counterforce to the power of the Confederation, insuring economic freedom.

It couldn't last, of course. Sooner or later, the center cannot hold. The traders might have acted against their "colleagues" who were engaging in outright piracy and pillage—but they didn't, and doomed the Polesotechnic League. Nor did they act against those who sold starships and high-tech weapons to barbarian planets, thereby dooming the Confederation.

That's the big picture. On a smaller scale, Mirkheim, the novel that leads off this volume, is a last hurrah for Nicholas Van Rijn, David Falkayn, Adzel, and Chee Lan. The old order is crumbling. As one of the Baburites says to David Falkayn during a tense situation, "You do not speak for the entire League. It no longer has a single voice."

Yet Van Rijn and his trader team persevere. Quoth Adzel, "Oh, I regret nothing . . . Let us savor this final adventure of ours for what it is." They'll tell sad stories of the deaths of kings some other time, after the hurly-burley's done.

Still, even though one danger is averted, the triumph is bittersweet, as the four go their separate ways, with Van Rijn musing (in his characteristic fractured Anglish), "I suppose will still be held solemn councils of the League for another century, till some Napoleon type without no sense of humor comes along and ends the farce."

As it happened, the Napoleon type was named Manuel, and he built an empire that would protect beleaguered Terra—Earth—from those extraterrestrial barbarians with starships and high-tech weapons. Empires can accomplish great things . . . and they can also commit even more terrible atrocities, sometimes at the same time. For its own protection, if not for less compelling reasons, the rising Terran Empire began annexing formerly independent star systems, whether they wanted to join the club or not.

And in the end, the Terran Empire contains the seeds of its own doom, a doom darker and more disastrous than was that of the smaller Commonwealth which it replaced. Its fall will be followed by the Long Night, which may engulf that sector of the Galaxy for thousands of years.

Yet there are those who fight to delay that inevitable fall, and make plans to shorten the Long Night's duration. Chief among them is Dominic Flandry, one of science fiction's most popular and beloved figures. He'll step onstage in the next volume, if the unfailingly patient reader will forgive my getting ahead of the story.

Once again, a word about the introductions to the stories. Poul Anderson did not, to my knowledge, do introductions to the two novels, but did introductions (and an afterword) to the two short stories set on Avalon when they appeared in The Earth Book of Stormgate. They were written as if by the Ythrian, Hloch of the Stormgate Choth. (For other details, see my introduction to The Van Rijn Method, the first volume in the Technic Civilization series.)

As for the two novelettes, "The Star Plunderer" had an introduction by Anderson on its first appearance in print, in Planet Stories. And in the case of "The Sargasso of Lost Starships," also from that grand old Planet pulp and here appearing in book form for the first time, all the blame for that story's introduction is mine.

"Sargasso" is pure-quill pulp writing, both in the style and in the plot, which is much unlike anything else in the Technic Civilization saga. I thought of doing an introduction exploring that aspect, and yielded to the temptation. (That was nowhere as strong a temptation as Valduma was for Donovan, but I'm obviously a lesser man than him.) I hope that Poul Anderson would not too severely disapprove of what I've done. And you don't have to read it.

Finally, as with The Van Rijn Method, once again the e-book version of Rise of the Terran Empire has a bonus: another essay by Sandra Miesel, authority extraordinaire on the works of Poul Anderson. It will illuminate the intricacies of the novel The People of the Wind (contained herein) far more than I could ever do.

—Hank Davis, 2009

 

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