The Evolution Of A Future History

Poul Anderson's first future history series, the Psychotechnic History, follows its model, Robert Heinlein's Future History, in several respects, one such respect being the almost total absence of continuing characters. In both series, two or three characters appear for a second time. That is all. In fact, the stories in Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth are not chronologically linear but contemporaneous, e.g., "Gentlemen, Be Seated" describes a lunar accident mentioned briefly at the end of "Space Jockey."

By contrast, Anderson's major future history series, the Technic History, might seem to be just two character-based series strung together. Its opening four volumes are set entirely within the lifetimes of van Rijn, Falkayn and their colleagues and therefore do not count as a future history. Nine entire volumes are set entirely within the lifetime of Dominic Flandry and therefore do not count as a future history. But that leaves only four other volumes! (For this purpose, I count "The Saturn Game," "The Star Plunderer" and "Sargasso of Lost Starships" as an extra volume to be read between the Polesotechnic League Tetralogy and The People Of The Wind. Including "Outpost of Empire" in the same volume as The Day Of Their Return makes the Technic History complete in seventeen volumes.)

However:

the nine-volume Flandry period is a sequel to the Polesotechnic League volumes;

the novel, The People Of The Wind, is set after van Rijn but before Flandry;

the remaining three volumes are collections and each of them comprises a future history in its own right.

Thus, what began as two series about individual characters became one massive future history series.