The Wound
The Severance
The 2280s collapse that fragmented a large share of the home system's population.
In full
It begins around 2280 and by 2284 has cognitively fragmented something like forty per cent of the Earth-system population. Characters who live afterwards date their lives from it the way people date them from a war — before the Severance, after it — and the novels treat it as lived history rather than as a mystery to be solved. What caused it is not settled on the page.
Key facts
- Begins around 2280; the worst of it by 2284.
- Roughly 40% of the Earth-system population affected.
- Survivors date their lives from it.
- Its cause is deliberately unresolved.