The long night Book

"The Long Night", by Poul Anderson, is set several centuries in the future. Sometime before the book begins, humans have explored and settled millions of planets, but then star-faring civilization fell. The settled planets became isolated from each other. Some sank into barbarism, some managed to retain technological civilization, but there is little interstellar travel.

The bulk of the book is about about a time when people are beginning to build a new interstellar society, re-establishing contact with previously lost planets. It is divided into five stories that are essentially unconnected except that they are set in this same hypothetical future. They don't share any common characters or any other connection other than being set in this same universe. (By the way, the stories were originally published separately in several different magazines over a period of 16 years.)

Basically, these are tightly plotted stories. That is, each story presents the heroes with a puzzle to solve. I'll avoid giving any spoilers here, but for example: In the story "Sharing of Flesh", the characters have to figure out why an isolated planet descended into cannibalism and how to end the practice. In "Starfog", they have to figure out how to find the home planet of a lost expedition that comes from a region of the galaxy where the stars are packed so closely together and the space is so full of cosmic dust that normal navigation methods don't work. Etc.

The best things about this book:

1. The grand view of (fictional) history. The author has clearly plotted out a future history of the galaxy spanning thousands of years, and written stories that fit into this framework. (Other Anderson stories fit in to this same history at other places. For example is Flandry books are set when the empire is falling.) It's fun to see how it all fits together. The history seems plausible to me: the pieces all do fit.

2. The individual puzzles are interesting to follow through. While this might seem like an off-the-wall analogy, I think lovers of murder mysterious might also like these stories. It's the same idea: clues are sprinkled through the story, events that might seem unimportant turn out to be crucial clues, etc. When you finally get to the ending, it all follows logically from what came before.

On the minus side:

1. Maybe this is a trivial point, but to me, Anderson has one really annoying writing technique: In any fiction story, you need a certain amount of exposition. In science fiction stories, the writer often needs to explain a lot of things that the characters all know but the reader doesn't, like the culture and history of this fictional future. Anderson routinely does such exposition by having the characters give each other long lectures on these subjects. But why would the characters tell each other on what they already know? In Anderson's books, he constantly adds tacit admissions that the speech is pointless: A character will say how annoying it is that this other person is lecturing him on what he already knows, or he'll make some comment about going on and on because he's nervous or upset, or some such. It's bad enough to have the pointless speech. Having the writer tell us that it's pointless makes it worse, not better.

2. The stories are filled with references to stellar and biological evolution, and several of the stories are pretty much all about the writer's theories about how this particular planet or whatever evolved. As a creationist, I find these totally implausible. I guess if you're an evolutionist they'll make perfect sense to you, but to a creationist it's like reading a story where the plot hinges on the "fact" that putting leaches on a sick person will cure the disease, or the assumption that black people are inherently lazy and criminal.