Times And Places

The Game Of Empire, CHAPTER ONE.

A future history series informs us of events that occur not only in different generations and centuries but also in different places and regions of space. Some instalments of Poul Anderson's Technic History overlap chronologically. Thus, Adzel studies on Earth while van Rijn outsmarts pirates in space. Later, van Rijn is on one planet while his trader team is on another. Ensign Flandry, The Rebel Worlds, "Hunters of the Sky Cave," A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and A Stone In Heaven show us Terra in Flandry's time whereas The Game Of Empire, set in the distant Patrician System, refers to the remote "...inner Empire..." (p. 197) Since there has been a recent "...Merseian onslaught...," (ibid.) we infer that Patricius, like the Taurian Sector, is in the volume of space that borders the Wilderness between the Empire and the Roidhunate. Although consecutive readers do not know this yet, A Stone In Heaven was our last sight of Terra because The Game Of Empire and the subsequent four instalments of the Technic History move not only further into the future but also further away in space, eventually arriving in another spiral arm of the galaxy.