By Poul Anderson, published in an auspicious year, 1964; see wiki.It is all rather slight, and all rather 1960's. I knew that when I bought it so I'm not complaining; lightweight fluff has its place in the world.
"Escape from orbit" features the usual kind of "oh we're in a spaceship that can't quite get home" kind of thing. "Epilogue" is about returning to Earth and finding a machine civilisation, but in the usual way of things the explorers are incomprehensibly uncomprehending, making the usual mistakes of failing to bother survey, impatience, and general lack of care and attention that drive so much early scifi.
"No truce with kings" is the lead story and is somewhat better; set somewhere on the west coast long after some civ-breaking catastrophe, we have a kind of conflict between centralised govt and local fiefdoms, with decentralisation winning despite the centralisers being supported by Espers who turn out to be space aliens who have a kind of psychohistory theory they are applying.
This might be seen as a mild dig at Foundation I suppose, in that the aliens support the "wrong" side and lose, and keep making excuses for why their well-intended interventions just end up killing people. Or maybe that was a dig at US foreign policy of the time.
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