Friday 27 January 2017

Important Dates

In Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, the politically unified North American continent is called the United States of North America and governed from Washington.

For purposes of teaching history in an interstellar spacecraft, important dates are listed as:

1492
1776
1969
2002

That last must have been the discovery of gyrogravitics. History becomes future history or, now, alternative history. Other important sf dates have been:

1964 Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud entered the Solar System
1984 need I say more?
1999 Dan Dare
2000 AD, an sf comic, still published
2001 comment unnecessary
2018 Volume I of James Blish's Cities In Flight, anti-gravity and antiagathics
2049-'50 Blish's A Case Of Conscience
2100 (approximately) Heinlein's Second American Revolution

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Poul Anderson tended to be sparing in his use of explicit dates for his books and stories. Aside from his Time Patrol stories and THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS, I don't remember him using dates very often. The only story in his Technic Civilization stories dated with a YEAR was "The Saturn Game," prefaced with a quote from a scholarly article pub. by the still fictional Apollo University on the Moon in AD 2057. Which means the events recorded in "Saturn" probably occurred two or three years earlier.

Sean