Connections

A long future history series incorporates many internal interconnections - or, as we might have called them when the Careers Service was briefly renamed the Connexions Service, interconnexions.

I tried to show this when summarizing the history of Ythrians within the Technic History here. For example, Nicholas van Rijn is a remote ancestor of Tabitha Falkayn and thus also of any children that Tabitha will have when married to Christopher Holm.

However, I failed to mention that it is The Earth Book Of Stormgate that informs us of:

Hloch and his mother, Rennhi, from whom he inherited the task of completing the Earth Book;

the first human-Ythrian contact;

the exploration of Gray/Avalon;

David Falkayn's discovery of Mirkheim and van Rijn's later journey to that planet;

the two-stage colonization of Avalon;

other events not directly related to Ythrians.

In Robert Heinlein's five-volume Future History, Volume IV, Methuselah's Children, contains the maximum number of cross-references to other volumes, even including a mention of the lost spaceship, Vanguard, which is the setting of Volume V. Thus, Methuselah's Children strongly unifies Heinlein's Future History. The Ythrians play a similar role in the Technic History. The mere presence of Erannath in The Day Of Their Return has diverted our attention from that novel back to The People Of The Wind and the Earth Book. Hloch cannot mention Flandry but certainly mentions the Empire. Flandry and Erannath are contemporaries and Flandry and others mention not only the Domain but also, more specifically, Avalon. In fact, I also forgot to mention that human agents of Merseia on Diomedes passed themselves off as Avalonians.