Historical Progression

Of the three collections mentioned here:

Trader To The Stars is just three stories about one guy, van Rijn, with no indication that this short trilogy is one small part of a vast future history series;

The Earth Book collects twelve works;

the first describes the human discovery of Ythri;

the second describes Ythrian and human exploration of the planet later colonized by van Rijn's protege, Falkayn;

in the tenth story, set centuries later, an Ythrian foresees the end of van Rijn's way of life (the shadow of God the Hunter is upon it);

the eleventh and twelfth stories, set in a later century, describe the joint human-Ythrian colony founded by Falkayn after the Polesotechnic League has begun its irreversible decline;

The Van Rijn Method is just the first of seven omnibus volumes collecting the entire Technic History in chronological order for the first time.

Quite a progression.