The Time Of Troubles

 

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Solar Commonwealth covers only the Solar System - or maybe a little bit more? - so why should the Time of Troubles that follows the collapse of the Commonwealth encompass a volume of space stretching two hundred light years outward from Sol? We know that Aeneas in the Virgilian System was colonized very early, that it is two hundred light years from Sol, that it had to defend itself against alien marauders during the Troubles and that, since then, military training has been incorporated into the University curriculum in Nova Roma. It is that two-hundred-light-year-radius volume of space that becomes the extent of the Terran Empire that emerges from and ends the Troubles.

Think about the extra-solar planets that had been colonized and civilized during the Commonwealth period: Hermes; Aeneas; Altai; Ansa; Vixen; Dennitza; Esperance; Ramanujan; Hopewell; Germania; Nuevo Mexico. Does it seem likely that any of these planets is among those human colonies that became barbaric and that joined the Baldic League which invaded the Solar System and sacked Earth twice during the Troubles?

"The Star Plunderer," the only Technic History instalment to be set during the Troubles, was inappropriately included in a collection entitled The Long Night. The Long Night is the longer period of interstellar chaos that follows the Fall of the Terran Empire. "The Star Plunderer" has found its proper place as the fourth of six instalments collected in The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire. Another appropriate place for this story would have been as the second of three stories to be collected in a volume intermediate between the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy and the Ythrian diptych in the original publishing order of the Technic History.

"The Star Plunderer" describes an interstellar scenario that is simply different both from the one described in the (earlier) Polesotechnic League series and from that described in the (later) Dominic Flandry Period series. Is this story a plausible intermediate stage?