Intimations Of Futurity

Every work of fiction is set in the present from the point of view of its characters. No one thinks that he lives in the future although 2000 was "the future" when I read sf comics in the 1950's. It might help us to appreciate a fictional point of view by imagining that an sf novel is set not in a remote future but in an alternative present. This would mean that the past also had been different but that is conceivable because technology could have developed more rapidly than it did.

Poul Anderson makes us very familiar with periods when men travel on horseback and carry swords. Such periods are often historical but can also be located in post-apocalyptic futures or alternative timelines. Vault Of The Ages begins in this kind of period but, after three pages of text, informs us that the viewpoint character, Carl, looks at:

"...a faded picture of a man, one of the marvelous works which must have been handed down since the Day of Doom."

-Chapter 1, pp. 15-16.

A photograph. And the Day of Doom is the end of our civilization. In Anderson's There Will Be Time, the characters refer to an equivalent event called the Judgment War and do not remember much of what it was about. How could they? Why should they? Their duties are to survive and to avoid more Judgments. Ours is to prevent them.