Nicholas van Rijn's protege, David Falkayn, is a series character in his own right, with one story set before he works for van Rijn's company, another before he meets van Rijn, four about the trader team led by Falkayn and a grand conclusion.
The Terran Empire
Dominic Flandry acquires a protege, his own daughter, Diana Crowfeather, who stars in what I call a "proto-series," i.e., a single work that was potentially the opening installment of a new series.
The Time Patrol
Manse Everard's protege, Wanda Tamberly, becomes a new continuing character in The Shield Of Time.
League, Empire and Patrol each confront their external opponents, most notably:
the Merseian Roidhunate aims to destroy the Terran Empire;
Neldorians and Exaltationists try to change the history guarded by the Time Patrol.
However, civilizations face not only external threats to their continued existence but also internal causes of their own decline. Chunderban Desai tells Dominic Flandry that:
"'...wrong decisions bring breakdown...Technic civilization started on that road when the Polesotechnic League changed from a mutual-aid organization of free entrepreneurs to a set of cartels. Tonight we are far along the way.'"
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), pp. 388-389.
We last saw van Rijn and Falkayn trying to hold the League together for a while after the fatal wound inflicted by cartelization. What had seemed to be an external threat had really been engineered by one cartel.
The most fundamental threat to the Patrol is internal not merely to the time-traveling civilization but to the cosmos: quantum chaos changes history unpredictably. We last see Everard and Wanda shortly after they have counteracted one accidental quirk in the temporal flux.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I wrote a long letter to Poul Anderson about THE GAME OF EMPIRE. In his reply, Mr. Anderson himself expressed regret that it was unlikely he would write any more stories featuring Diana Crowfeather. Basically, that was because he had said it was time to move on from the Technic Civilization series and turn to other ideas and topics. Iow, the books he wrote in his late phase beginning with THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS.
Sean
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