Future History Cross-References

I have been without Internet access for most of today. The blog pageview counter must be miscalculating because it says 19687 so far today and has shot up every time I look at it.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, "What Shall It Profit?" (1955) builds on the background established by "Quixote and the Windmill" (1950). The technologically unemployed drink and discuss society. "What Shall It Profit?" begins with Barwell saying that the (figurative) chickens flew away three hundred years ago. That would be in 1900, according to Sandra Miesel's Chronology. 

"Quixote..." has a surprise ending about an Asimovian robot. "What...?" has a surprise ending about the Heinleinian search for longevity. Read I, Robot and the Future History before the Psychotechnic History, then read Anderson's Technic History. The future has histories - but so has the perpetually reinterpreted past, as Anderson points out in his introduction to Orion Shall Rise.

A handful of characters appear twice but only twice in the Psychotechnic History. Mostly, this future history series comprises one-off stories strung along a common timeline likes beads along a thread. We never see what becomes either of the unemployed robot or of the mentally deficient immortals. But we do see humanity from 1958 to a long way into the future.

Addendum: Final count for the day, 19769.