The Bigger Picture III

Of course the summaries in the previous two posts omit the beginning and end of the Technic History. The beginning is interplanetary exploration in the twenty first century. The long ending is:

measures taken by Dominic Flandry and others to strengthen certain colonized planets in the hope that they will endure as economic and political units despite the inevitable cessation of interstellar trade and security during the unpreventable Fall of the Terran Empire;

measures taken by Roan Tom and no doubt others to rebuild interstellar alliances shortly after the Fall;

measures taken by the Allied Planets to re-civilize isolated and barbarized planets long after the Fall;

the eventual proliferation of human civilizations throughout several spiral arms of the galaxy;

the discovery of descendants of rebels expelled from the Terran Empire by Flandry although his name is not remembered;

the discovery of a new source of immeasurable wealth...

There is some justification for calling the concluding volume of The Technic Civilization Saga Flandry's Legacy. And what a long way we have come from van Rijn, Falkayn and Falkayn working for van Rijn. See here.