Times And Places

In The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume II (see here), time passes, although not in this volume on a historical scale, and we also learn of approximately simultaneous events in different places: van Rijn is in Chicago Integrate while his trade pioneer crew is on Merseia and others are elsewhere. Thus, this volume makes a solid contribution to the Technic History. When we want to read about historical changes covering more than a single lifetime, then we can turn to Vol I, stretching from the twenty first century to the Polesotechnic League, or to Vol III, extending from the League to the Empire - and these are only three of seven volumes. As a matter of fact, after the Terran Empire, there are three further periods of the Technic History:

the Long Night;
the Allied Planets;
a time of human civilizations in several spiral arms, one arm served by "the Commonalty" -

- and maybe a fourth period corresponding to the "Galactic Archaeology Society" mentioned in the Introduction to "The Star Plunderer," although no installments of the History are set in this later Galactic period. However, as readers of the series know, there is no one-to-one correspondence between the remaining four volumes and the remaining four or so periods! The Terran Empire in the lifetime of Dominic Flandry fills most of the remaining volumes.

The stories in Robert Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth are meant to be approximately contemporaneous, set about 2000. See Meanwhile. Thus, here again, although this collection contributes to the Future History, longer term historical changes are to be found in the preceding and succeeding volumes. Anderson's Psychotechnic and Technic future histories are Heinleinian in structure but vaster in scope.