Central to the work of Poul Anderson is his great future history series, The History of the Polesotechnic League, featuring two of his most famous characters-the wily trader, Nicholas van Rijn, and the explorer, David Falkayn. Anderson’s stories and novels of the League have grown and coalesced into one of the major works of contemporary SF. Now, in The Earth Book of Stormgate, the final twelve stories are collected to complete the series’ five volumes— The Trouble Twisters, Trader to the Stars, Satan’s World, Mirkheim, and The Earth Book of Stormgate (which includes the complete text of the novel The Man Who Counts).
The present volume brings together these stories, which span four thousand years of future history, and sets them in the context of the whole series, with a detailed chart that incorporates many of Anderson’s later works in one enormous schema. These twelve adventures chronicle the expansion of earthmen out into the inhabited galaxy, meetings with alien races, the growth and decay of the first interstellar government (a trading association governed by trader-adventurers), followed by the foundation of the first interstellar empire. The theme that links the stories in this volume is the relations of humans with the great winged race, the Ythri.
