Connections

Virgin Planet.

Reading a future history series, we are informed of events in different times and place and might recognize connections that the characters cannot. Thus, it is learned that the violently shifting gravitational fields in a trepidation vortex can either destroy a spaceship on hyperdrive or fling it a thousand light-years off course. Indeed, some ships had disappeared before such storms were even known to exist. Now we know what had happened to the Traveler although that ship is not named in Virgin Planet. In this novel, the Coordination Service is troubled by the physical threat of trepidation vortices. In a later novel, The Peregrine, the Cordies will be troubled by the culturally disruptive behaviour of the Nomads and we, the readers, already know that the Traveler, lost in space, became the first Nomad ship. At least, Poul Anderson's "Gypsy" has informed us that the Traveler crew founded a nomadic culture and Sandra Miesel's immediately following interstitial passage informed us that the new culture came to be called the Nomads. The Psychotechnic Institute and the Planetary Engineers are in the past. The Cordies are in the (fictional) present. The Nomads, currently growing somewhere in the background, will eventually carry knowledge through the Third Dark Ages. History happens.