Customer Reviews

The Van Rijn Method: The Technic Civilization Saga #1

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Anderson is one of the grand masters of the field, and these adventures -- carefully thought-out, with solid worldbuilding and scientific speculation, plus great characters and wonderful action -- are classics. If you want to know science fiction, you should read these. And if you want to have a great time... then read them for that, too.

I was so happy to see another classic reprint from Baen. (I have the Christopher Anvil and James H. Schmitz collections.) I enjoyed the Polesotechnic League stories years ago, especially the adventures of David Falkayn, Chee Lan, and Adzel; and I'm really looking forward to the second volume, David Falkayn, Star Trader. Van Rijn's character is a nice change of pace for space exploration, and his twists on old sayings are fun, such as "This is the times that fry men's souls." Also, his stirring speech in The Man Who Counts that incorporated the famous speeches from Terra's history: "This blessed plot, ...," Pericles' funeral speech, Scots Wha' Hae, the Gettysburg Address, and something about St. Crispin's Day. (I'm not familiar with the Pericles speech or St. Crispin's Day. I'd like to see them all referenced somewhere.) Anyway, thanks again Baen for letting more people enjoy these classics!

These stories are wonderful -- if you haven't read them before, stop reading this review and start reading the stories. You're in for a treat. This is volume one of a proposed six-volume collation of Poul Anderson's wonderful Technic stories, starting with the beginnings of human exploration of the solar system, and moving out into the heyday of the Commonwealth. The world building is superb, the stories fun, and the characters fascinating (and believable). Wonderful stuff, and now we can read them in internal chronological order. So much fun!

If you enjoy stories involving worlds created by a talented author with a physics degree (and thus has the background to create believable worlds), then this book is worth a look. Comprised of ten short stories plus a novella, set on imaginative worlds where there is often a challenging problem to overcome, this first collection of Technic Civilization stories includes a range of characters, with several, including the novella, featuring Nicholas Van Rijn. The stories written later in the series show how Poul Anderson has improved his skills and the novella, written in 1958, provides an interesting baseline from which you can see how the author has developed over the decades. I enjoyed the later book in the series more than this one, which is why I've rated this down. Read the series in order and your enjoyment can only grow!

Baen Books has thus far published five ominbus volumes of Poul Anderson's "Technic Civilization" tales, with two more planned to complete the series. "Van Rijn's Method" is the first volume. Together, the seven volumes will cover thousands of years of future history.

I first read most of these stories decades ago, and it is an immense pleasure to find them all together in one collection. Poul Anderson was particularly noted for his "hard science fiction" (fiction with a goodly dose of real, physical science behind it) and this is particularly evident in the detail and care with which he crafted the numerous worlds upon which his characters found themselves. And the natives of those numerous worlds were never simply humans in bad make-up (as characterized the original "Star Trek" television series), but true aliens in physiology and psychology. While Anderson's stories had no shortage of intense action, at heart they were driven by ideas, and most usually heroes achieved victory by thinking rather than shooting.

In the Technic Civilization stories Anderson created some of the most popular, enduring characters in all of science fiction, including Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry -- and this collection of tales contains all the van Rijn and Flandry stories and books (as well as others having nothing directly to do with those flamboyant heroes).

If you already are familiar with Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization series, this multi-volume collection is your cup of tea. And if you are not familiar with it, you owe it to yourself to read them to become acquainted with some really classic science fiction.

Poul Anderson was one of the Grand Masters of Science Fiction for many decades. It is terrific that his "Technic Civilization" series of novels and short stories is back in publication. This future history series postulates a dazzling future for mankind as humans spread across the galaxy encountering alien races and civilizations. Some of these have very alien motivations, while others have motivations, i.e. avarice and greed, that humans recognize all too well. This is all great fun.

Nicholas Van Rijn is president of Solar Spice & Liquors, an interstellar trading corporation that specializes in finding new civilizations and selling them, well, Solar spices and liquors. These stories are a part of Poul Anderson's vibrant Technic Civilization series during the period in which the Polesotechnic League ("League of Selling Skills") dominates. Mankind has invented cheap and practical interstellar travel. Humans and their alien friends and rivals take the profit motive to the stars, and this makes for a fascinating and optimistic vision of the future.

Van Rijn himself is an unforgettable character. Smart and tough, with the ability to understand both human and alien motivations, his trials and travails as an interstellar trader make for great fun. Van Rijn is directly the protagonist in only a few of these tales, but he is the archtypical interstellar capitalist, and his influence can be felt throughout. Highly recommended. RJB.

An excelent book for those who like SF of the 50's and 60's. Anderson is a fine story teller, and his characters are some of the most interesting ever created.

This collection of stories by Poul Anderson is the 1st Book in a "Technic Civilization" Series.

The collection groups the stories in "chronological order of occurance" (not in the order they were published)... some of the original publish dates of the stories go back to the early 50's, and go through the late 70's - I tend to like the stories best that were published in the late-50's through mid-60's.

Some of the stories don't hold up so well to time, technically-speaking; but others hold up quite well. The main story in this book (really a book unto itself) is THE MAN WHO COUNTS(1958), a story of survival on a far-off non-metallic World, with three human aircraft crash survivors trying to get back to their base (before their food runs out... the native food is inedible), with the help of intelligent sea-faring indigenous beings that are in an ongoing war with another non-sea-faring faction.

One idiosyncrasy with the title of this book "The Van Rign Method" is that the odd, but likeable, Van Rign character doesn't show up for quite some time in the book (really shows up in only half the stories), and shows up quite a bit in the first stories in the next volume in the Series.

Glad to see many of these stories in one volume, some I had not read before.

This book was much better edited than most of the Compilations I have read recently where they have just taken the Computer version and printed it, which ends up with errors in the text. So well done here.