Thursday 27 October 2016

Beginning To Construct A Chronology

A document quoted in "The Saturn Game," and discussing then recent events, is dated 2057. At that time, there is interplanetary exploration but not yet a hyperdrive. "The Trouble Twisters" is set less than four hundred years after the invention of the hyperdrive (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 89) - but we are not told when that was.

The three stories that were originally collected as The Trouble Twisters present three stages of David Falkayn's career:

apprentice;
journeyman, factor;
Master Merchant, trade pioneer crew leader.

Like the first four Time Patrol stories, these first three Falkayn stories are bound together as each new narrative refers to the earlier installments:

"When he got his journeyman's papers, he was one of the youngest humans ever to do so. In large part, that was due to his role in the trouble on Ivanhoe." (The Van Rijn Method, pp. 270-271)

"Chee bristled. In some respects she was not unlike Master Beljagor." (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 91)

Chee Lan has just been introduced whereas Beljagor was in the previous story. In The Technic Civilization Saga, that puts him in the previous volume.

"Not being Martin Schuster, to upset a whole cult by introducing the Kabbalah, Falkayn must needs stall." (p. 120)

Again, in the Saga, Schuster is way back in the previous volume.

The Time Patrol gets a lot of trouble from an age of bandits in the two-hundred-fifth millennium and the League is troubled by squadrons from "...the Pirate Suns..." (p. 90) How does that work?

On land, bandits hide in the woods or hills;
at sea, pirates hide out on islands;
in space, pirates hide in remote planetary systems;
in time, bandits hide in a particular millennium?

No comments: