The Incomplete Psychotechnic History And The Iffy Department

A The Complete Psychotechnic League that excludes two entire novels is not complete!

The last three items in Volume 3, "Entity," "Symmetry" and "The Chapter Ends," are all iffy vis a vis Psychotechnic History continuity so maybe it is appropriate that they are gathered together like this at the end of the series: in an "Iffy Department," so to say. It can be argued that the History properly so called culminates, satisfactorily, with The Peregrine.

However -

Two chief threads in the History are psychotechnics and the Nomads. There are psychotechnicians in the Galactic era of "The Chapter Ends." Sandra Miesel's interstitial passage immediately preceding "The Chapter Ends" reads in part:

"...as Trevelyan had foreseen decades earlier, the self-sufficient, enterprising Nomads bore seeds of knowledge safely through the Third Dark Ages. The antecedents of our own civilization were among those who reaped what the wandering Nomad ships had sown." (p. 194)

I think that this passage plausibly bridges the gap between Trevelyan's period

of the Stellar Union with its Coordination Service and the later Galactic period especially since Trevelyan, when leaving the Service and joining a Nomad ship, would have brought with him knowledge of psychotechnics. The technological discoveries made in "Entity" and "Symmetry" might have affected only parts of the galaxy, then been lost during the Third Dark Ages.

Thus, the single irresolvable contradiction remains one line in "Entity" stating that interstellar travel is, at that time, only a few decades old. If Anderson had not dropped "Entity" from the time chart, then he could have edited it to iron out this chronological anomaly.