Oikumenical Timeline

For his Demon Princes novels, Jack Vance imagined that a new calendar was created for which our year 2000 became the new year zero. In the first three novels, Vance provided the dates for some future events...

734 - Cosmopolis magazine was founded
1029 - the Interworld Police Coordinating Corporation (IPCC) is founded
1404 - "The Wages of Sin" is published in Cosmopolis
1479 - Smade's Tavern is constructed on Smade's Planet
1480 - Lugo Teehalt admitted to Sea Province University
1490 - Kirth Gersen is born

In 1499, Mount Pleasant (on the planet Providence near Ferrier's Cluster), a town of 5,000 people, would not give protection money to Malagate the Woe. Malagate assembled a space fleet with the help of four other "Demon Princes" and destroyed the town, taking the survivors as slaves. Kirth Gerson is one of the few residents of Mt. Pleasant who escaped death and enslavement.

1500 - "When is a Man Not a Man?" in Cosmopolitan
1507 - Robin Rampold is captured by Dasce
1509 - "How the Planets Trade" in Cosmopolis
1520 -  "The City of Mists" in Cosmopolis
1521 - "Smell Your Best" in Cosmopolis
1524 - Gersen visits Smade's Tavern and meets Teehalt
1525 - publication of the 348th Edition of the Popular Handbook to the Planets
1526 - Gersen visits The Palace of Love
1923 - "Smade of Smade's Planet" feature article in Cosmopolis

Extant magazine

When Vance wrote the last two novels in the Demon Princes series, he did not provide any more dates for the events in Kirth Gersen's life. However, I like to imagine that Gersen worked with Karalin Umdys (who was a clone of Jheral Tinzy) for several years in the time gap between the end of The Palace of Love and the events depicted in The Face.

During the course of events as described in The Book of Dreams, Gersen brought into existence another magazine: Extant.

After Alice Wroke and Gersen teamed up to defeat Howard Treesong, they continued to investigate the secret forces that had motivated and guided the Demon Princes. In the Ekcolir Reality, Sam Jaqy wrote a novel called The Femtobot Paladins that explained the source of the femtobots that drove Howard Treesong to commit his monumental crimes.

Reconstructed from the Ekcolir Reality.
image credits

Kirth was led to believe that Karalin had died during their investigation of the Fomalhaut star system. However, Karalin (or her replicoid) lived on and worked with Alusz to investigate advanced alien technologies that had been deployed on the "lost world" of Thamber.

According to my former collaborator, Yōd, Gersen, Alice, Alusz and Karalin were all eventually warned to stop their investigations or face dire consequences. It is easy to imagine that Kirth eventually gave up on his struggle to reveal the secret origins of Malagate and lived out his life in comfort with Alice. Sadly, even the stories that were written about them in the Ekcolir Reality do not provide a clear account of their ultimate fates. It is almost as if someone sanitized the historical record.

We will apparently never receive a clearer account since access to the archives of the Asimov Reality now comes with a serious restriction: you can never leave the AR Simulator. Yōd was never able to confirm that an artificial copy of Araminta Smade exists here in the Final Reality. However, that might not matter because Zeta suspects that Araminta never knew the ultimate fate of Kirth and Alice within the Asimov Reality.

Next: another nomination for the 2018 SIHA award.
More Vance: May 2019 August 2019

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