Reading Orders III

This is an impossible supposition but, if the order of writing and the chronological order of fictional events had been identical in the case of Poul Anderson's Technic History, then the stories would have been collected in a multi-volume linear sequence starting with "The Saturn Game" and "Wings of Victory," there would have been no later need to gather together any previously uncollected stories from earlier periods of the history and therefore Hloch's introductions to The Earth Book Of Stormgate would not have been written and would not have made their substantial contributions to the series.

However, a series as long and complicated as the Technic History could not have been conceived and constructed as a linear narrative:

the Young Flandry Trilogy was written after the Captain Flandry series;

the "young Adzel" story, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," was written after Adzel had been introduced as a member of the trader team and indeed this juvenile short story written for a different market is an expansion of a short passage of dialogue in the first trader team story;

it was retroactively decided that the interstellar empire founded by Manuel Argos was the same one later defended by Dominic Flandry; 

the Ythrians, who are present throughout most of the history and almost from its beginning, were introduced en bloc in a single creative burst in 1972-'73.

The manner of the writing of the series affects its structure.