In The Game..., Dominic Flandry is still defending the Terran Empire and postponing the Long Night whereas "A Tragedy..." begins with Roan Tom faring forth during the Long Night amidst the ruins of the Empire, potentially the beginning of an even longer series although we already know that "A Tragedy..." is the first of the concluding four instalments of the Technic History. In fact, we have gone beyond that history because Technic civilization has joined its predecessor, Western, in the past tense. The civilizations that are built from the ruins will not bear either name.
Oswald Spengler's Fall of the West occurs between Volumes I and II of James Blish's Cities in Flight future history. Future history series parallel and enhance each other.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That seems about right, 500/600 years from THE GAME OF EMPIRE to "A Tragedy of Errors." I think it's reasonable to assume the chaos of the Long Night had been raging for 300 Terran years by Roan Tom's time.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that the Long Night is not much like the fall of the Roman Empire (at least in the West).
In the fall of Rome, nearly all the Western Empire was taken over by Germanic barbarian invaders.
Even North Africa was conquered by the Vandals for a while.
These involved movements of large numbers of people; as ruling elites in, say, Visigothic Spain, in a mass turnover of populations in Britain/England (as recent aDNA research has shown) and some frontier areas, and intermediate cases like northern Gaul.
And then other population movements hit the Eastern/Byzantine Empire's European territories -- the Slavs, particularly.
In the Long Night, nothing analagous seems to have happened.
For one thing, the "barbarians on the frontier" of the Terran Empire were mostly non-humans, which means the sort of absorption that a lot of the Germanic invaders of the Roman Empire ended up undergoing wouldn't be possible. They could be culturally absorbed, within limits, but not biologically.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, but we see only a very small part of the fallen Empire in "A Tragedy of Errors." Plenty of room for barbarian invasions elsewhere.
In some of our letters Anderson and I speculated that something analogous to the Eastern Roman Empire occurred: a remnant of the Empire survived elsewhere, possibly even ruled by non-humans who had been culturally assimilated.
Ad astra! Sean
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