A Time Travel Series And A Future History Series

To summarize many previous posts, my two main interests in sf are time travel and future histories. Poul Anderson excels at both and combines them in There Will Be Time which might, on that account, be regarded as his culminating volume except that his canon culminates several times. If we were to take just one Anderson volume onto a desert island, should it be:

Time Patrol, which collects the entire Time Patrol series excluding only the long novel, The Shield Of Time, -

- or:

The Earth Book Of Stormgate, which "spans, illuminates and completes" the first main section of Anderson's longest and most detailed future history series, the History of Technic Civilization?

For many years, I would have said Time Patrol but I now favour the Earth Book because of its more complicated structure and double-layered narrative. The twelve collected installments, including one novel, take us from First Contact with Ythri during the first Grand Survey to the human-Ythrian colonization of the Coronan continent on Avalon. Thus, they begin before and end after the entire Solar Commonwealth-Polesotechnic League period of the Technic History, which they also incorporate. Hloch's twelve introductions and single afterword transport his readers even further into the future, into the early Terran Empire period and the aftermath of the Terran-Ythrian War which is recounted in the Earth Book's companion volume, The People Of The Wind.

The Earth Book is followed by the Young Flandry Trilogy if read as a discrete volume or by "The Star Plunderer," about the Founder of the Terran Empire, when its contents are incorporated into The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III (of VII). Thus, there are two alternative but equally valid reading orders.

The Earth Book is the kind of detailed future history series that Robert Heinlein had envisaged when he began to write the original Future History which inspired Anderson's Psychotechnic History.