Wednesday 4 April 2018

Two Periods

A future history series often covers two main periods.

Heinlein's Future History
(i) Scientific advances culminating in interplanetary colonization.
(ii) The Second American Revolution and its aftermath.

Asimov
(i) Terrestrial overpopulation and human-robotic extrasolar colonization.
(ii) Interstellar civilization with a galactic population and secret robotic manipulation.

Anderson's Psychotechnic History
(i) An interplanetary period.
(ii) An interstellar period.

Anderson's Technic History
(i) Earlier and (ii) later interstellar periods.

Niven's Known Space History
(i) Interplanetary exploration, asteroidal colonization, Terrestrial overpopulation and STL extrasolar colonization.
(ii) FTL.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The problem I have with including Asimov's Robots/FOUNDATION series in this list that I don't think they were originally meant to be linked at all. Also, my view is that his linking of these stories was far less successful than Anderson's linking of the Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry series. A third point is that I recall the Galactic Empire/FOUNDATION stories being set so FAR in the future of the Robot series (about 50,000 years) that I did not find the linking up convincing.

Sean