Trader Team

The trade pioneer crew can more briefly be described as the trader team. Their first story was entitled "Trader Team," which was changed to "The Trouble Twisters." This team appears in three novellas and two novels although the second novel, Mirkheim, is not so much an addition to the series as a sequel to it because it recounts how, seven years after the team had been disbanded, it was reassembled but for a different purpose. In the original publication order of the Technic History, the three novellas were distributed between two collections whereas, in The Technic Civilization Saga, they and the first trader team novel, Satan's World, are four of the seven works that are collected as Volume II which is, not entirely inappropriately, entitled David Falkayn: Star Trader, even though the two introductory stories about Falkayn had appeared in Volume I, The Van Rijn Method. The remaining three works in Volume II are two novellas about van Rijn and one short story about some less scrupulous merchants of the Polesotechnic League. Complicated but coherent, I think.