Giving A Series Body

A future history series needs, ideally, a lot of individual short stories with one-off characters. Such stories give the series body and illuminate multiple aspects of a many-faceted future society or civilization. Robert Heinlein began this process with the ten stories collected in the Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills of Earth. None of these stories advances the historical process. They have no common characters and all are set about the year 2000 in space, on the Moon, on Earth or on Venus with references to Mars and other parts of the Solar System. At least two stories directly overlap. Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Moon," is alive and is mentioned but does not appear just as a character in Poul Anderson's "A Little Knowledge" has seen Nicholas van Rijn on their equivalent of television.

Anderson's Technic History incorporates two major character-driven series but is also well provided with such body-giving short stories:

"The Saturn Game"

"Wings of Victory"

"The Problem of Pain"

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," about James Ching

"The Season of Forgiveness"

"A Little Knowledge"

"Lodestar," insofar as it focuses on Coya rather than on the familiar characters

"Wingless"

"Rescue on Avalon"

The Polesotechnic League sub-series, together with its antecedents and aftermath, would have been much poorer without the cumulative impact of these additional stories.