The Beginning And The End

Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization begins with planetary exploration in the outer Solar System in the twenty first century in "The Saturn Game" and ends with interstellar exploration in a globular cluster in another spiral arm of the galaxy several millennia in the future in "Starfog." The narrative has not so much come full circle as ascended one rung of a spiral.

How much history happens between the beginning and the end:

in "The Saturn Game," English is spoken;

in the intervening history, English has become Anglic;

in "Starfog," Anglic is an ancient dead language.

Although human beings interact with many other intelligent species during the Technic History, the concluding four installments focus instead on how the passage of so much time across so much space has affected humanity. "Starfog" ends with the discovery that the descendants of colonists of a planet with high radiation levels are no longer human.

As at the end of Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles, we become the aliens.