A Millennium Later

If we ask what happens in the twentieth century of Poul Anderson's Technic History timeline, then the answer is that we already know because that timeline does not diverge from ours until some time in the twenty first century whereas, if we ask what will happen a thousand years after the events of Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, then the answer is that we cannot know because Larsson did not write a sequel set that far in the future and indeed would not have done so because he was not writing that kind of fiction.

On the other hand, Millennium, like any contemporary fiction, is set in a timeline that is identical with ours except for the existence of the characters and the occurence of the events that are described in the Trilogy. Thus, whatever is going to happen in the Millennium timeline is what is going to happen in our timeline. We do not know what that is but we need not envisage a different future for Millennium as I was doing when I began to write this post. This is a consequence of the genre. Although I am intrigued by ways of fitting different genres into a single fictional tapestry, there is no need to project a science fictional future for Millennium.