Saturday 14 December 2019

Future History Pyramids

A recurrent theme on this blog is the pyramidal structure of a future history series with earlier stories providing the bases for successive layers of later stories culminating in the peak of a single last story, sometimes set in a much further future.

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the foundation stones are the stories of early interplanetary and interstellar exploration and of the pre-problematic Polesotechnic League. The Nicholas van Rijn and trader team series culminate in "Lodestar" but there is a sequel, Mirkheim. The Dominic Flandry series culminates in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows but there is a sequl, The Game Of Empire. The four post-Imperial stories comprise one about the Long Night, two about the period of recovery under the Allied Planets and one set in a much later period of multiple interstellar civilizations. There is also an intermediate layer of stories between Mirkheim and the Young Flandry Trilogy.

Next we will consider the pyramidal structure within the Flandry period.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And did Aycharaych visit the Pyramids of Giza during his secret visit to Terra (as mentioned in Chapter I of WE CLAIM THESE STARS)? He did say he wanted to visit certain forests and graves, and to contemplate certain works of art on Earth.

So I can imagine Aycharaych visiting the tombs of Dante and Manuel Argos and the Pyramids! And the DANGER of visiting Earth with Imperial Intelligence on the alert for him would have appealed to the Chereionite!

Ad astra! Sean

Sean M. Brooks said...

Drat, I should have said Aycharaych mentioned visiting Terra in Chapter II of WE CLAIM THESE STARS. Not Chapter I.

Ad astra! Sean