The Polesotechnic League Series by Poul Anderson
The Polesotechnic League Series, created by Poul Anderson, is a collection of science fiction stories set in a future where interstellar travel is commonplace, allowing for the expansion of humanity across the stars and interaction with various intelligent alien species. The series spans two to three centuries and is connected to Anderson's "Flandry" series, depicting the decline of the Empire that follows the League. Unlike a traditional government, the Polesotechnic League functions as a mutual benefit association of interstellar merchants, characterized by an anarchic system where financial motivations and business practices take precedence.
Central to the series is the figure of Nicholas van Rijn, a colorful and anarchic merchant, alongside his protégé David Falkayn and his diverse trader team, which includes a dragonlike alien, a fierce feline-type alien, and a ship-computer. The narratives often revolve around the challenges these characters face on various alien worlds, emphasizing the importance of cultural understanding alongside technological prowess. Over the course of the series, themes of conflict, cooperation, and the eventual decline of the League emerge, as characters navigate the complexities of alien societies and their own evolving roles within the cosmos. The series concludes with reflections on the future of human and nonhuman interactions, even as internal and external challenges loom on the horizon.
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The Polesotechnic League Series
First published:War of the Wing-Men (1958; serial form as “The Man Who Counts,” Astounding Science-Fiction, February-April, 1958; revised with restored text as The Man Who Counts, 1978), Trader to the Stars (1964; as stories, Analog, 1961, 1963, 1964), The Trouble Twisters (1966; as stories, Analog, 1963, 1965, 1966), Satan’s World (1969; serial form, Analog, May-August, 1968), The People of the Wind (1973), Mirkheim (1977), and The Earth Book of Stormgate (1978; as stories, various publications, 1956-1974)
Type of work: Novels and stories
Type of plot: Science fiction—future history
Time of work: The twenty-third to twenty-sixth centuries
Locale: Various planets including Diomedes, Hermes, and Mirkheim
The Plot
In Poul Anderson’s extensive “future history,” the stories of the Polesotechnic League cover some two to three centuries. The stories connect with his “Flandry” series, concerning the downfall of the Empire, which will succeed the League. Unlike the Empire, though, the Polesotechnic League “is not a state, not even a government. It’s nothing but a mutual benefit association of interstellar merchants.”
An underlying premise of the stories in the League sequence is that interstellar travel has become not only possible but also relatively cheap. This travel has resulted in a rapid spread of humanity to the stars and to contact with many intelligent alien races. The spread of civilization has happened on too large a scale for merely planetary governments to check.
The League is, then, almost an anarchy, in which the only powers are financial ones and the only restraints are those of good business. The first hero Anderson created to express this ethos is the appropriately anarchic Nicholas van Rijn, founder and owner of the Solar Spice and Liquor Company. He speaks English with continuous comic mistakes, is gross in figure and in appetites, and continually proclaims his devotion to nothing but profits, beer, akvavit, and his ever-changing stable of mistresses. Van Rijn was later supplemented by the more normal hero-figure of David Falkayn, brought on as van Rijn’s protégé, and by the three other members of Falkayn’s “trader team”: Adzel, an immense dragonlike being who is a Buddhist by conviction and reluctant to hurt any living creature; Chee Lan, a small, fierce, female alien of feline type; and their ship-computer Muddlehead. The interaction of these five characters provides a good deal of the comedy as well as the serious elements of the League sequence.
The first major story of the sequence, War of the Wing-Men, sets up a characteristic plot pattern. Van Rijn, with two companions, one male and one female, is stranded on the alien planet of Diomedes by sabotage. The surface of Diomedes is almost entirely water, and its dominant race is intelligent but winged. The creatures probably could transport van Rijn and his companions to the League outpost on the world, if they wanted to, but van Rijn’s ship has ditched and sunk far from that outpost and in the middle of a war between two groups of the “wing-men,” the Flock and the Fleet.
Captured originally by the Fleet, who are technologically superior, van Rijn escapes to the Flock. With the assistance of his male companion, a skilled engineer, he reverses the Flock’s technological inferiority, but only enough to force a draw. To save himself, van Rijn has to persuade the two sides to make peace, despite each side’s deep conviction—based on apparent genetic sexual differences—that the other is bestial, worse than savage. How van Rijn brings this about is, in a way, the theme and point of the book.
Most of the succeeding novels and stories follow the same outline. Van Rijn, Falkayn, or Falkayn’s “trader team” will be faced with a technical problem of some kind on an alien world of lower technology. The answer will depend not merely on applying superior technology but also on understanding the culture in which technology is embedded. In The Trouble Twisters, Falkayn discovers how to shift a vital spaceship part on a planet where wheels are forbidden, while his superior hatches a longer-term plan to destroy the religious taboo on the wheel. In Trader to the Stars, an unrelated character tells van Rijn about a mysterious sequence of events on an alien planet, leaving van Rijn to explain the alien logic that underlies the mystery. In Satan’s World, Falkayn discovers that the League itself is being penetrated by an apparently more technically advanced civilization. The key to defeating it is once again provided by a true understanding of how the alien race has evolved—from a Minotaur-like race of herbivores, not from omnivores (like human beings) or carnivores (like Chee Lan).
Mirkheim shows a deviation from this pattern in that Anderson has begun to be preoccupied with the forces that will destroy the League. On one hand is the anarchy the League itself fosters, which has created rivals from some of the intelligent races that were once merely customers. On the other is the development of powerful governmental and bureaucratic forces. Moreover, van Rijn, in Mirkheim, has grown old. In an earlier but connected story, “Lodestar,” collected in The Earth Book of Stormgate, van Rijn had been coerced by Falkayn into leaving the immensely valuable resources of Mirkheim to be exploited by the developing races. In Mirkheim, it transpires that the new danger to Mirkheim comes from human forces, whom van Rijn can defeat only temporarily. Van Rijn’s old age and the breakup of the League are imminent and inevitable. The sequence ends with a note of elegy and of succession.
A happy note in this defeat is the anticipated rise of nonhuman but friendly intelligences, among them the winged Ythrians (not the same as the Diomedans), one of whom is imagined as the scribe nostalgically assembling the relatively scattered or lightweight League stories of The Earth Book of Stormgate. The People of the Wind deals with human/Ythrian conflict, eventually resolved, in a period after the dissolution of the League.