The Fall of the First Terran Empire
By Mal Arin, published 23,953 H.E. by Terra-Prime Publishing
Company.
The premier work of Second
Empire scholarship, this book was over 200 years in the making.
Author Mal Arin consulted primary sources on thousands of worlds
while doing research for his magnum opus. The complete work is
over 3 terabytes. It is estimated that, if printed, The Fall
of the First Terran Empire would run to over 100 volumes equivalent
to the volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica 9th Edition.
No comparable work would appear until Maarten Travesh's The Rise of Culture in the First Human Galactic
Interregnum about 26,500 H.E.
Mal Arin's premise in his great work was that
the First Empire was in a constant state
of fall from its very beginning. Arin considered the Councilate
phase inferior to the various Leagues of Worlds (i.e. the Nexus Worlds) that preceded it, and the
Imperial phase was even less efficient than the Councilate. Arin
maintains that a vast variety of forces worked to slow the First
Empire's Fall, but never in Imperial history was the process of
decline reversed.
copyright © 2003, Don Sakers
All rights reserved