The Day Of Their Return And The Triumph Of Time

Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return, about future millenarianism, is a sequel to Anderson's Young Flandry Trilogy and part of his Technic History whereas James Blish's The Triumph Of Time, about a real cosmic ending, is a sequel to Blish's Okie series and Volume IV of his Cities In Flight Tetralogy, the last Okie city having flown in Volume III.

Why should human beings inhabiting colonized extra-solar planets become fanatical and even Fundamentalist? The narrator of Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" explains the Aenean Peter Berg's faith by stating that he was raised in the outback of a far off colonial planet. Ivar Frederiksen refers to Bible and blaster backwoodsmen on Aeneas. The Aenean Jaan the Shoemaker very nearly inspires a jihad.

Although Blish's Okies liberated human peasants on a planet in the Greater Magellanic Cloud, the Cloud planets retained what are described as back-cluster superstitions. Thus, Jorn the Apostle was able to found the Warriors of God and to lead a jihad.

Jaan and Jorn might found a cross-cosmic league of interstellar prophets.