Wednesday, 7 September 2022

The Future History Triad

Robert Heinlein's Future History: Some character in The Green Hills Of Earth should have turned out to have been a "Masquerade" alias of Lazarus Long.

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History: Maybe we should have been told what became of those underground immortals in "What Shall It Profit?"

Anderson's Technic History: We would really like to see Aychraych survive the bombardment of Chereion and find a different reason to go on living.

- my point here being that these three future history series form a literary triad, the Psychotechnic History modelled directly on the Future History and the Technic History, also by Anderson, growing organically to become a Heinleinian future history on a vaster spatiotemporal scale. There is a great deal more to be said about the Technic History but it is also good to remember its antecedents.

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