The Fall of the First Terran Empire by Mal Arin

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.