LexGame1

Please forgive me a cliche, but: it's been quite a time.

I am writing this in the latter hours of New Year's Eve 2300--another cliche, this time literally true. Earlier today I made yet another series of tweaks to the file that became the volume you're currently perusing—one of the last before it's to be "banded". Back in March of 2297 when I proposed a series of ultrafiles concerning all of history in segments to my editors he was one of many saying I had aimed far too high, that all of history was too extensive, even with the best AIs and scholars assisting. Certainly there were times I thought them right.

And yet here we are with the last volume being readied just in time.

Had we been able to go back in time and talk to the people we wound up talking about in this project, what would they say? Would any of them from the past volumes have possibly been able to guess how much change—to the world and to humanity and their progeny—would be chronicled here?

The prior file, which covered 1800 to 2050, included some of the greatest social changes man ever knew—the Waning Empires, revolutions, civil wars, the Industrial Revolution, the flowering of the sciences, the World Wars, the Great Depression, the Atomic Age, the Cold War, the first computers (the AIs made us put that in), the Silicon Age, the boom and bust of the fin de seicle, the Apocalypse-Wow years and the Rise of Terror, the Great Reckoning, the Gene Revolutions, the Expansion, and the Lost Conflicts, ending with what is fancifully called the "Days of the Stellar Phoenix".

Which leads us to this volume. A purely prosaic description of this file would be "A History of Humanity And the Other Sentients of the Sol System for the Years 2050 to 2300 (Standard Reckoning)"—but even that belies the great and far-reaching things included here. These years have managed to beat those of the last file in sea changes; progress to optimists such as myself.

And now, with a simple chime from my assistant, I welcome in a new century. May we all see good days throughout.