The Psychotechnic League

An organization known as the Psychotechnic Institute is founded during the 1970s that uses psychodynamics to influence government policy and popular attitudes, with the goal of redirecting society towards greater rationality and internationalism.

The Psychotechnic Institute assists a reborn United Nations based in Rio de Janeiro to become a world government, and also encourages space colonization.

Early in the 22nd century, as the settlements on the Moon, Venus, Mars, and the Asteroid Belt grow in importance, the United Nations is succeeded by the Solar Union.

The Second Dark Ages end during the 27th century, followed by the discovery of a form of faster-than-light travel that results in interstellar colonization and commerce, and the creation of the Stellar Union and its enforcement agency, the Coordination Service.

Specifically, the situation depicted in "Brake" - with the protagonists managing heroically to delay, but unable to prevent, the inevitable destructive ending of their civilization - is similar in some respects to the Dominic Flandry series.

Reviewer Vincent Carter noted that "Like much of the Science Fiction written previous to the advent of actual space programs, Poul Anderson's early future history grossly underestimated the cost in money and material resources of even the smallest and shortest venture outside Earth's atmosphere.

Yet in reading "The un-man" we find that that ravaged world had been able to embark on a full-scale colonization of Mars, quickly enough for Rostomily to have spent most of his adult life there.

In the early 1980s, Tor Books collected sixteen of the stories (including Virgin Planet), with forewords and intertextual commentary by Sandra Miesel, into three volumes under the general title "The Psychotechnic League".