Van Rijn And Falkayn

Nicholas van Rijn has some adventures, David Falkayn has some adventures, then Falkayn leads van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew/trader team. This summary more or less covers the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy:

Trader To The Stars (van Rijn collection)

The Trouble Twisters (Falkayn collection)

Satan's World (van Rijn and Falkayn novel)

Mirkheim (van Rijn and Falkayn novel)

- with two qualifications:

first, in Mirkheim, the team has been disbanded for several years but van Rijn reassembles it for a special mission;

secondly, by the end of Mirkheim, the Polesotechnic League has entered its terminal decline and Falkayn has had to become acting CEO of SSL while van Rijn travels around in the team's former spaceship, Muddlin' Through, trying to hold the League together for a short while longer. 

Next, readers get the best of two worlds:

first, the Technic History continues into new eras;

secondly, however, an omnibus collection, fictitiously compiled during one of the later periods, presents eight further Polesotechnic League instalments, the same number as are in the Tetralogy, and these extra instalments feature:

van Rijn;

the team of Falkayn, Adzel and Chee Lan;

van Rijn's granddaughter, Coya Conyon, whom we have already seen as Falkayn's wife in Mirkheim;

Ythrians - the next major plot development after the League;

Merseians, another major plot development, which had appeared in Mirkheim;

the planet Mirkheim before the events of Mirkheim.

We have seen the end of the Polesotechnic League but we get it back! Fiction can work like that although not reality:

"Bid time return..."