The Future History Idea

The idea behind Robert Heinlein's Future History was that common background references like place names such as "Drywater" on Mars would link otherwise independent short stories narrated as if addressed to a magazine-reading public living just a few years after the events described. This is how it was in those earliest days of space travel... sort of thing. What was (thought to be) just in our future was just in their past.

Only The Green Hills of Earth really conforms to this template. The Man Who Sold The Moon describes earlier technological advances whereas later volumes focus mainly on large scale political events: the Second American Revolution and the subsequent persecution and interstellar exile of the Howard Families.

This Future History idea really belongs in a multi-volume series whereas Heinlein's Future History, four and a half volumes, became only a small part of his complete works. Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization is a fuller embodiment of the idea despite being dominated as it is by three series characters, van Rijn, Falkayn and Flandry.

Anderson's equivalent of The Green Hills Of The Earth is The Earth Book Of Stormgate. In the Earth Book, the opening story, "Wings of Victory," helps to set the scene by introducing the Ythrians and mentioning the planets, Cynthia, Woden and Hermes. "The Problem of Pain" features an Aenean on Avalon. "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" shows domestic life in the Solar Commonwealth, giving the future a daily life, as was claimed for Heinlein. "The Season of Forgiveness" is a Christmas story set on an extra-solar planet. There is very little in the way of continuing characters among these early Technic History stories. We do not yet realize how important van Rijn will become.

Anderson fulfils Heinlein's idea.