Expansion: The History of the Galaxy · The world
The History of the Galaxy
Andrei Livadny’s future history in some sixty Russian episodes, from a fog-drowned Earth to the thirty-ninth century, and where the three English novels fall in it.
The History of the Galaxy, «Экспансия. История Галактики», is Andrei Livadny’s future history: some sixty Russian novels, novellas and stories that run from a poisoned Earth in the twenty-second century to the thirty-ninth, with one protagonist, as his English publisher put it, the human race itself. Magic Dome Books translated three of them in 2017 and 2018 as Expansion: The History of the Galaxy: Blind Punch, The Shadow of Earth and Servobattalion. They come from three eras spread over four centuries, were written thirteen years apart and out of order, and they read best with a map.
This page is the map: the timeline that joins the three books, the Earth they leave and the colonies it turns on, the hypersphere that made the leaving possible, and the machines, the servos, whose name means something bigger in each book. Its frames are places, eras and machines; the book pages carry the plots. As of October 2026 no film, television series, game or comic of the cycle has been found, so on this walk the world page stands where the screen notes stand on others. It spoils all three books.
A sixty-book history, three books in English
Livadny was born in 1969 (in Pskov, according to his English publisher; in the south of Russia, he says) and grew up near St Petersburg. After army service he worked by day and wrote at night, and kept the day job even after Eksmo’s first contract in 1997. The History of the Galaxy was never planned. In 2002 he arranged novels he had already written into one consistent line, and it kept growing: his overview of January 2017 counts sixty works, eighty-three planets, sixteen alien races, the Great Exodus and two Galactic Wars, and that September he told Magic Dome it stood at sixty-one and was not finished. The counts never agree for long: FantLab’s list held fifty-four in 2010 and now nears seventy. As he put it in 2017, “I made a point of not specifying which nation colonized the Galaxy”.
Magic Dome Books, which also published his LitRPG trilogies Phantom Server and The Neuro, chose three. Blind Punch (September 2017) is the cycle’s first episode, set from 2197 and written in 2013, one of the later ones; The Shadow of Earth (March 2018) is «Дабог», set in 2607, written in 2000 and rewritten in 2017; Servobattalion (October 2018) is «Серв-батальон», set in 2624 and written in 2007. The English numbering follows the history, not the writing: read them in order and you move forward four hundred years, then seventeen.
They are closer than they look. Blind Punch and The Shadow of Earth are the first and last parts of a Russian trilogy: in March 2016 Livadny changed the ending of «Слепой рывок» so that its colony transport would be the one bound for Dabog, and the untranslated middle novel, «Беглец» (The Fugitive, 2019), tells that voyage. The Shadow of Earth reaches back across the gap. Its museum on Dabog keeps the Fugitive’s armour plate, and its first-generation heroes are Catherine Rimp, the engineer Hans Gervet and Max Bourne, the name both English books give the hero the Russian calls Ivan Stozharov. Servobattalion stands alone in the middle of the war The Shadow of Earth starts, but its admirals fought at Dabog and its machines were modelled on Dabog’s. One more novel of the history is in English, outside the series: The Island of Hope («Остров Надежды»), which Magic Dome had already published in 2015, unlabelled, as the first of his books in English.
1 The Fugitive Comes Down The Fugitive comes down on Dabog in 2217 with the people of Rimp Cybertronics aboard, Catherine Rimp and the engineer Hans Gervet among them. Its voyage is the untranslated middle book of a Russian trilogy; The Shadow of Earth shows this crater as a museum diorama four centuries later, under a reddish sun and purple clouds. The giant loader that strips the hull’s armour will become Gervet’s first servomachine.
Earth of the corporations
The history opens on an Earth that has run out of air. In the twenty-second century a World Government rules in name and the corporations rule in fact; Blind Punch names four leading ones, Rimp Cybertronics, Genesis, Megapool and Cryonics. An ecological catastrophe has killed the biosphere, the terraforming of Mars has stalled in its dust storms, and in the book’s own blurb, “Cities the size of continents are drowning in a toxic industrial fog.”
By 2197 the fog has settled at about five hundred metres. The city was built for a fog that would stop at 270, windowless technical levels below that and megasuburbs above, so the homes along the new border stand empty. The rich live under domes above the real clouds. Of eighteen billion people, four billion live in in-modes, sealed life-support capsules three metres long hung from the ceilings of their flats, with a treadmill, a mist shower and half a kilo of food concentrate a day. They moved in as a temporary measure. Their lives happen in the Layer, the planet’s cyberspace, in four tiers that follow status: the Lowest, the Middle, the Upper and the near-mythical Celestial. Avatars cost money, real faces are a luxury of the Upper Layer, and people in capsules are called cans. The hero of Blind Punch, Max Bourne, is a twenty-year-old can of the Middle Layer who gambles his way out.
Above him the corporations argue over whether to save the planet or leave it: Megapool is building a new megacity in Antarctica, while Cathy Rimp of Rimp Cybertronics wants Genesis money for a colony transport, the Alpha. Genesis’s old founder, Ulrich Fitzgerald, shares her verdict on Earth (“The planet is dead and it is time to move on.”) but sets her harsh terms.
The Layer outlives the fog. Fitzgerald himself will later shut it and force people out of their capsules, The Shadow of Earth records, but in 2624 Servobattalion’s recruits still come out of the Layer, picked by their scores in its tournament arena.
2 Above the Fog Line Earth in 2197, the year Blind Punch opens. The city was built for a fog that would stop at 270 metres, windowless technical levels below that and megasuburbs from three hundred; it settled at five hundred, and the rich live under domes above the real clouds. Hardly anyone goes outside. The servos do: small service robots scrub the corrosive film off the façades, the first machines in the series to carry a name that will mean much more in the books to come.
3 The Green Zone Four billion of Earth’s eighteen billion people live in in-modes, sealed capsules with a treadmill, a mist shower and a daily ration of food concentrate, brought in as a temporary measure thirteen years before Blind Punch opens. When Max Bourne finally walks out of his building in Chapter Two, the domed park he remembers from when he was seven, the green zone, is full of them: capsules over dead flowerbeds and the stumps of felled trees.
4 The Layer The Layer is where Earth’s cans really live: a cyberspace of four tiers, from the Lowest to the near-mythical Celestial, and your status decides how high you may go. Max Bourne is a pale, skinny young man in a capsule, but here he walks in an expensive, muscular avatar. The Layer’s base is a vast dump of virtual refuse, and network attacks sweep through it as grey tornadoes. Four centuries on, the Alliance will find its pilots here.
The hypersphere and the Great Exodus
The way out is the hypersphere. In the author’s chronology a young astrophysicist, Johann Ivanov-Schmidt, publishes its theory on 12 May 2209, and reviewers of Blind Punch say the theory and the first flights through it come later in that book. Two years earlier, by the same chronology, the Alpha launches with half a million colonists in cryosleep and vanishes at the edge of the Solar System; Earth learns its fate a thousand years later.
Livadny set out the physics in a 2014 essay: an energy universe of ten levels, pictured as nested spheres threaded with lines of tension. A ship dives in, rides a line and surfaces at a node, and the lines that can be ridden join stars no more than about fifteen light-years apart. The first navigators could not find the surfacing points. They rode the lines until their power gave out and came out wherever that was, hundreds or thousands of light-years from home. That is a blind jump, «слепой рывок», which the English title renders as Blind Punch. In The Shadow of Earth Earth’s intelligence chief says the ships of the Exodus were lost to the blind punch, and that Earth lost 217 reconnaissance ships learning the routes.
The Great Exodus comes anyway. Over half a century, by the author’s count, 7,023 colony transports leave the Solar System, and the fate of most is still unknown. Most never reach the stars they aimed at; through blind jumps their crews settle thousands of star systems, many of them cut off for centuries. Some of those colonies of the first jump sink back into a simpler life, while others regain spaceflight and trade among themselves. The first wave fades by about 2270. One of the ships is the Fugitive, which carries Rimp Cybertronics’ people to Dabog in 2217. In The Shadow of Earth’s museum its colonists, most of them out of the Layer and unready for a real world, are driven underground by alien microbes, and Gervet turns the giant loader that stripped the ship’s armour into the first universal servomachine.
5 The Lunar Yards The Great Exodus is a shipbuilding age. By the author’s count 7,023 colony transports leave the Solar System over half a century; the fate of most is unknown, and blind jumps scatter their crews across thousands of star systems. The Shadow of Earth remembers how it ended, three and a half centuries later: thousands of transports swallowed by hyperspace, and dozens of starships left unfinished in the shipyards of the Moon.
Earth against its children
The Shadow of Earth tells what became of the planet everyone left. Ulrich Fitzgerald, now a hundred and twenty, saves it when only a billion people remain: his Martian fleet seeds the poisoned oceans with engineered bacteria and the air with absorbents, and he revives the World Government, blocks the Layer and forces people out of the in-modes. The oceans are sealed under steel and cities built over them. Then the population climbs again, and the Moon, Mars, the Asteroid Belt and the Jovian mining colonies break away and dictate terms to Earth for almost three hundred years.
John Winston Hammer ends that. Elected in 2561, in March 2564 he sends a handful of ancient warships, still bearing the half-erased logos of the four corporations, against the Martian Mining Company; the Moon capitulates, and Hammer proclaims the Terran Alliance and wins a long war for the Belt. By 2606 he has won everything except room. “Earth was an eternal city”: one technosphere over every continent, sixty billion people, eight in ten of them on subsidies, Mars ruined and the Moon hollowed out. A report on a second wave of expansion finds that “all accessible planets located within one hyperjump from the Solar System have been settled”, by children of the Exodus who will take only a few of Earth’s billions. Earth decides to take a planet anyway, at what the author’s chronology calls the Lunar Conference.
The first target is Dabog, a thriving colony with old factories in its bunker zones, struck from orbit on 9 October 2607 to frighten every other colony into line. The strike sets off the old reactors buried under the two cities it hits, and the landing that follows is broken by one colonist, Igor Rokotov, in his family’s antique farm walker: the first day of the First Galactic War. The blitz fails, the colonies close ranks, and a long blockade of Dabog ties down two of Earth’s strike fleets. By Servobattalion’s time the sides are set: the Terran Alliance (Earth, Mars, the moons of Jupiter, the colonies of New Earth and Yunona) with seven strike fleets, against the Free Colonies, the developed Exodus worlds around the Central Worlds cluster.
Servobattalion is set in 2624, in what it calls the fifteenth year of the war. Battles are fought over “intermediate surfacing points”, the systems from which a fleet can jump on to the Central Worlds, and the draft age has been cut to fifteen. On 18 July Hammer dies, and Admiral Alexander Nagumo, the ice-hauler pilot he once met in a bar on Phobos, takes his place. By the author’s chronology the war lasts thirty years and ends with a battle for Earth and the Alliance’s capitulation.
6 The Eternal City Four hundred years after Blind Punch the fog is gone and Earth has been built over. In The Shadow of Earth’s prologue one technosphere covers every continent, the oceans are sealed under steel, transparent megasuburbs rise into the clouds like terrariums, and the Square of Five Corners, Blind Punch’s Plaza of Five Corners, repeats on level after level. Sixty billion people live here, most of them on subsidies, and their president wants another planet.
7 The First Terran Fleet The Terran Alliance begins with scrap. In March 2564, by the history The Shadow of Earth tells in its prologue, John Winston Hammer, elected three years before, sends a handful of ancient warships, still bearing the half-erased logos of Genesis, Rimp Cybertronics, Megapool and Cryonics, against the Martian Mining Company. They destroy its cruiser and storm Phobos; the Moon capitulates; Hammer proclaims the Terran Alliance and fights a long war for the Asteroid Belt.
8 The Blockade of Dabog Dabog was meant to frighten every colony into line. On 9 October 2607 the Terran fleet strikes it from orbit and sets off the old reactors buried under two of its cities, and one colonist in a farm walker breaks the landing; with his first kill, The Shadow of Earth says, the Galactic War began. By the author’s chronology the long blockade that follows ties down two of Earth’s strike fleets. Servobattalion’s Admiral Kupanov began his career on the artillery deck of a cruiser in that first attack.
The machines
The word that runs through all three books is servo, and it keeps growing. In Blind Punch servos are Earth’s small service robots: they do the unskilled work, servounits scrub the corrosive film off the façades, and the violinist of the prologue, an artificial intelligence, wears a body built of servotoys and foam flesh. In The Shadow of Earth a servomachine is a walking machine taller than a house. Hans Gervet built the first on Dabog from the giant loader, with bionics copied from the planet’s great lizards, and Max Bourne was its first pilot. Every family came to own one, to drain swamps, clear the jungle for the Bao plantations and fight off the dicorts, and the Rokotovs’ Aquila still knows its family by their blood. In 2607 it is a restored museum piece, with neural chips from old androids and an open question about whether it has a mind of its own.
Servobattalion shows what Earth made in answer. After the defeat at Dabog the Alliance gathered its engineers on Yunona and showed them walking war machines of its own, made “as an analogy for the walking servomachines of Dabog”; by 2624 it fields the forty-five-tonne Hoplite and the Phalanger, carried to battle by Nibelung assault carriers. Their minds are Maverick modules, in Russian «Одиночка», the Loner. Howard Faragney’s group began the first, ALONE, in December 2609 and finished it in two and a half months, and against Dabog’s refitted farm walkers and the colonists who piloted them the early Mavericks suffered one defeat after another. So Faragney proposed wiring a human pilot into the machine through a neurosensory shunt, so that the machine could learn from him. When the crystal modules passed a hundred chips the Mavericks began to show personalities, and when a pilot died his machine fought on with his last thoughts. Faragney’s Beatrice-4 has two and a half thousand chips and a woman’s voice in the pilot’s head, and it greets its recruit with “Good morning, pilot.” The publisher’s blurb puts the book’s argument in one line: “The war of humans is gradually transforming into a war of machines.”
9 A Family Walker Hans Gervet’s servomachine was a farm tool first. In the Dabog of The Shadow of Earth’s museum dioramas every family owns one, to drain swamps, clear the jungle for Bao trees and fight off the dicorts, the planet’s cliff-climbing lizards. This is Aquila, the Rokotov family’s walker, which still knows its family by their blood. By 2607 it is a restored museum piece; on 9 October Igor Rokotov walks it out against Earth’s landing.
10 The Pines of Yunona Yunona, in 2624. In The Shadow of Earth it is a dead colony, its settlers killed by an alien virus; by Servobattalion the Alliance has made it one vast weapons laboratory, hidden under plantations of identical modified pines that grow ten metres in a year. Howard Faragney, chief designer of the Maverick combat AIs, rides up from his bunker four kilometres down for a breath of real morning air; on the testing grounds under the pines, Hoplites and Phalangers stand in rows.
11 The Empty Cradle The Maverick module is the machine’s mind: a crystal of neural chips that learns from its pilot through a neurosensory shunt and, as its designer found, keeps what it learned when the pilot dies. Servobattalion opens after the battle with one such machine on Vesuvius: a rebuilt Hoplite whose Beatrice-4 has lost her pilot, and which throws a stranger out of its cabin and runs the test course alone.
Beyond the three books
Everything after Servobattalion is in Russian. By the author’s overview the First Galactic War leaves many worlds without their biospheres and opens hundreds of new hypersphere routes, and the settled stars get a name, the Inhabited Galaxy. A century of local wars follows, the Second Galactic War, until in 2717 the worlds found the Confederation of Suns («Конфедерация Солнц») and a Council of Security of Worlds; a thousand years of flowering and slow decline come after, and expansion reaches a starless region the author calls «Рукав Пустоты».
The aliens come late. None of the three English books, as far as their excerpts and reviews show, has an alien mind in it; Livadny says the first contacts came right after the Galactic War, without saying which, and were kept secret; FantLab dates «Чёрная Луна», the novel of one of them, to 2717. He counts sixteen alien races in the History of the Galaxy (thirty-six once his later cycle is counted), among them the two-headed Logrians, who in his history first worked out the theory of hyperspace. As the Confederation declines, over-implanted humans on the Corporate Fringe fight digital wars, and the last-numbered episodes, set in 3895, leave the colonized worlds cut off from one another. “They’ve fought two wars. And then all of a sudden they’re isolated from each other,” the author told Magic Dome. The story goes on from 3920 in a separate cycle, «Экспансия. История Вселенных», whose first novel, «Тень Земли», is not the English The Shadow of Earth.
12 After the War By the author’s chronology the First Galactic War lasts thirty years and ends around 2637 with a battle for Earth and the Terran Alliance’s capitulation, leaving many worlds without their biospheres; a century of smaller wars follows. The English books leave the war in its middle years, so this is a painted aftermath rather than a scene from them: one of the machines that outlasted the war, on one of the worlds it burned.
On screen and elsewhere
Nothing from the History of the Galaxy is known to have reached the screen. As of October 2026 no film, series, animation, game, comic, audio drama or stage version has been found, and no option or rights sale has been reported: searches in English and Russian turned up none, and neither the author’s site, his author.today page nor FantLab lists one. That is absence of evidence; no page says the books were never optioned. The nearest things are a GIF trailer Magic Dome made for Blind Punch and the galleries of 3D and fan art on the author’s site. The only game found is the one inside the series, in Servobattalion’s Layer.
The books live on as audio. Tantor published all three in English, read by Aaron Shedlock: Blind Punch (21 November 2017, 9 hours 1 minute), The Shadow of Earth (12 June 2018, 8 hours 29 minutes) and Servobattalion (28 February 2019, 7 hours 29 minutes); the Audible pages credit the translation of the second and third to Sofia Gutkin. In Russian the publisher IDDK (ИДДК) records the cycle as numbered episodes, the early ones read by Dmitry Kuznetsov: «Слепой рывок» runs 11 hours 21 minutes, the 2017 «Дабог» 10 hours 3 minutes, «Серв-батальон» 9 hours 47 minutes. No translation into a third language was found.
The English series stopped at three. FantLab’s page for «Дабог» notes that, by the author’s account, the novel’s English translation flopped in sales, which may be why no fourth volume followed. On Goodreads the three books have just over a hundred ratings between them; in Russian, «Дабог» alone has more than seven hundred FantLab votes.
13 The Only Game No game of the History of the Galaxy has been found, but Servobattalion has one inside it. In 2624 the teenagers of Earth’s emptied megacities get free accounts in the Layer, whose tournament arena offers servomachine combat, and the Alliance drafts the best scorers as pilots. Major Herpack blames the designer Faragney for a cyberspace where that is the only game; one Russian reader found it hard to believe that gamers make soldiers.
The history at a glance
| Era | Years | What happens | In the books |
|---|---|---|---|
| Earth of the corporations | 22nd century | A World Government rules in name, four corporations in fact. The biosphere dies, industrial fog drowns the megacities, the terraforming of Mars stalls; billions move into in-modes and live in the Layer | Background to I |
| Blind Punch | 2197–2214 | Max Bourne, a can of the Middle Layer, gambles his way out of his capsule; Cathy Rimp courts Genesis for a colony transport and Megapool plots to stop it; military AIs, the Outlands, the first hypersphere flights | I · Blind Punch (Russian episode 01, «Слепой рывок», written 2013) |
| The Alpha | 2207 | The colony transport of Rimp Cybertronics and Genesis, half a million colonists in cryosleep, vanishes at the edge of the Solar System; Earth learns its fate a thousand years later | The author’s chronology, in the years of I |
| The hypersphere | 2209 | Johann Ivanov-Schmidt publishes the theory of the hypersphere | The author’s chronology; recalled in II |
| The Great Exodus | 2210s–2270 | 7,023 colony transports leave the Solar System; blind jumps scatter them across thousands of star systems, and the fate of most is unknown | Between I and II |
| The Fugitive | 2217–2218 | Rimp Cybertronics’ transport brings Catherine Rimp, Hans Gervet and the first generation to Dabog | «Беглец» (2019), untranslated; remembered in II |
| Earth rebuilt | After the Exodus | Ulrich Fitzgerald clears the air, blocks the Layer and empties the in-modes; Earth is built over; the Moon, Mars, the Belt and the Jovian colonies dominate it for almost three hundred years | II, prologue |
| The Terran Alliance | 2561–2564 | Hammer is elected (2561); in March 2564 old corporate warships destroy the Martian Mining Company’s cruiser, the Moon capitulates and Hammer proclaims the Terran Alliance; a long war for the Belt follows | II, prologue |
| The second wave | 2606 | Sixty billion people and nowhere to send them: every world within one jump is already settled. Earth decides on invasion | II, prologue |
| The First Galactic War begins | 2607 | On 9 October the Terran fleet strikes Dabog; Igor Rokotov and his family’s farm walker Aquila break the landing; the blitz fails and Dabog is blockaded | II · The Shadow of Earth («Дабог», written 2000, rewritten 2017) |
| The Maverick | 2609–2610 | ALONE, the first Maverick combat AI (begun December 2609), loses to Dabog’s farm walkers; pilots are wired into the machines (training from August 2610) | Backstory to III |
| The Island of Hope | 2609–2717 (FantLab) | A Russian episode of the same history, «Остров Надежды» (1997): children raised among the ship graveyards of the Galactic War | In English (Magic Dome, 2015) as a standalone, outside the series |
| Hammer’s death | 2624 | Hammer dies on 18 July and Nagumo succeeds him; the Thirteenth Servobattalion, recruited through the Layer’s arena, drops on Ankor on 12 August; a prologue on Vesuvius looks back from 2627 | III · Servobattalion (Russian episode 09, «Серв-батальон», written 2007) |
| End of the First Galactic War | c. 2637 | After thirty years, a battle for Earth and the Terran Alliance’s capitulation; many worlds lose their biospheres; the settled stars become the Inhabited Galaxy | Not in the three English books |
| The Second Galactic War | 2637–2717 | A century of local wars | Not in the three English books |
| The Confederation of Suns | 2717 onward | A thousand years of flowering and decline; around its founding, the first, secret contacts with alien minds («Чёрная Луна», 2717); the Corporate Fringe and its over-implanted digital warriors | Not in the three English books |
| The far future | 38th–39th centuries | The Sphere, the Seven-Day War and other wars and contacts with alien races; a second Confederation; the last-numbered episodes (3895), in which the worlds drift apart | Russian cycle; continued from 3920 in «Экспансия. История Вселенных» |
Reading order
- Read them in the English order. It is the history’s order: Blind Punch (2197–2214), The Shadow of Earth (2606–2607), Servobattalion (2624, with a prologue in 2627). The writing order was 2013, 2000, 2007.
- Each stands alone. Each has its own cast and a complete story. Blind Punch builds the Earth the other two remember; The Shadow of Earth starts the war; a Russian listener says «Серв-батальон» reads naturally straight after «Дабог».
- The Russian trilogy is «Слепой рывок» (2013) – «Беглец» (2019) – «Дабог» (2000, rewritten 2017). Only the first and last are in English, so the Fugitive’s voyage to Dabog happens offstage.
- Between II and III the Russian cycle has «Зона Отчуждения», «Возвращение Богов», «Форт Стеллар», «Остров Надежды» and «Десант на Счастье»; only «Остров Надежды» is in English, as The Island of Hope.
- Russian numbering. The audiobooks number the parts as episodes, with duplicates; the author’s own text series on author.today puts «Слепой рывок» first, «Дабог» fourth and «Серв-батальон» eighth.
Notes
- English names first. The translations rename freely and this walk follows them: Ivan Stozharov becomes Max Bourne in both Blind Punch and The Shadow of Earth; Екатерина Римп becomes Cathy or Catherine Rimp; the family machine «Беркут» (the golden eagle) becomes Aquila; the AI module «Одиночка» becomes the Maverick. In Servobattalion the English keeps the names of the author’s earlier Russian text (Donald Crowe, Herpack, the cruiser Apostle), which his 2025 revision has since changed; its own change is Kupanov’s old cruiser «Эммануил», which becomes Book II’s Endgrouse.
- Not «Тень Земли». The Shadow of Earth is «Дабог»; its English title is the name of one of the Terran cruisers that strike Dabog. The Russian novel «Тень Земли» (set in 3920) opens the later cycle «Экспансия. История Вселенных» and has not been translated.
- Four corporations or five? Blind Punch names four; the author’s 2017 overview adds a fifth, «Новый Век».
- One plaza, two names. Blind Punch’s Plaza of Five Corners is The Shadow of Earth’s Square of Five Corners: the same place four hundred years on, translated two ways.
- 2217 or 2218? The author’s list of colony transports lands the Fugitive on Dabog in 2217; FantLab dates the novel «Беглец» 2218. Blind Punch itself is dated 2197–2214 by FantLab and 2197–2215 in the heading of the author’s own fragment.
- Cassia or Dabog? The author’s overview puts the failed first combat trials of the «Одиночка» machines on the planet Cassia (Кассия); the English Servobattalion has the first Mavericks losing to Dabog’s refitted farm walkers. This page follows the English.
- Moving texts. Livadny keeps revising. «Слепой рывок» was revised in 2016, 2018 and 2019; «Дабог» was rewritten in 2017, and the English follows the rewrite; «Серв-батальон» is now sold as an author’s version of 2025, while the English follows the earlier text, whose opening the author posted on his site in 2015. Dates on this page are the author’s own (his 2017 overview and his list of colony transports) and FantLab’s where the novels give none; where an English book gives its own date it wins (Servobattalion’s English prologue says 2627, the earlier Russian text 2617, the current one 2624).
The whole walk: The Series · The History · I · II · III