Tuesday 10 April 2018

Post-Imperial Year Dates

3600 "A Tragedy of Errors"
3900 "The Night Face"
4000 "The Sharing of Flesh"
7100 "Starfog"

These are the last four dates in the Chronology of Technic Civilization (see any volume of The Technic Civilization Saga or here) but is there any basis for such dates?

There are explicit year dates in "The Saturn Game" but are there such dates in any other Technic History installments? Some installments tell us how many years or centuries later they are than others. Thus, a chronologist beginning with an arbitrary year date, e.g., 2150 for "Wings of Victory" or 3000 for the birth of Dominic Flandry, can devise a very loose timeline but it can only be very loose.

An alternative approach, perhaps more in accordance with Poul Anderson's texts, would be to acknowledge that we do not know and not to assign any precise A.D. year numbers after "The Saturn Game."

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I agree, commentators or fans, like Sandra Meisel and myself, can only compile very loose chronologies, with only "The Saturn Game" giving us any dates. All we can do is propose approximate dates.

Still, it was fun, using Sandra Meisel's Chronology, to attempt revising it to a hopefully more "accurate" form. Perhaps a simple listing of the Technic Civilization stories in terms of their internal chronology, with no dates after the "Saturn Game," is the best we can do.

Sean