Ends Of Eras

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, both Mirkheim and A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows are good "end of an era" novels although they are completely different eras.

Mirkheim is the beginning of the end of the Polesotechnic League and is the last time that we see the League, van Rijn, Falkayn and the trader team. Despite its "end" status, Mirkheim is the opening installment of Baen Books' The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire. In the following installment, Falkayn's son, born near the end of Mirkheim, is an adult and his son has been born.

Every end is a new beginning, as we are told at the end of James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, - and even more forcefully at the end of the concluding Volume IV when the mutual annihilation of two old universes is followed by the creation of several new universes. See here. I am meant to be discussing Poul Anderson but comparisons between future histories are inevitable.

A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows is, appropriately, the concluding installment in Volume VI, Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra. What ends in this novel is not the Terran Empire but:

legitimate rule in the Empire;
the threat to the Empire posed by the last surviving Chereionite, Aycharaych;
Dominic Flandry's second chance of happiness with a woman that he really wanted to be with.

The novel ends with:

the bombardment of Chereion;
the prayer of Bodin's return, which signals the beginning of a happy era on Dennitza.

Despite all this, we are pleased when Flandry returns in the first two of the six installments collected in Volume VII, Flandry's Leagacy. In this volume, he is first named at the very end of the opening chapter of A Stone In Heaven. We were not necessarily going to see Flandry again but fortunately we do.