1930

One advantage of blogging is that, if we forget to include a quote in a particular post, then we can include it in a later one. Yesterday, in a completely different context, I had read a passage that I had thought was highly relevant both to the twentieth century (in which it was written) and to future histories (written in that century). However, the context was so different that I had forgotten the passage when I wrote:

1930, 1950, 1990, 2000

In Italy in 1930, Antonio Gramsci wrote in one of his Prison Notebooks:

"The old world is dying and the new world struggles to be born - now is the time of monsters..."

1930 was also the year of publication of Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men. (See the first link above.)

We remember Poul Anderson's "New centuries scream in birth."

Future histories do not have villains as such. However, we remember political "monsters" in Poul Anderson's "Un-Man" and "The Sensitive Man" and in the real twentieth century! (Anderson's Technic History incorporated his Captain Flandry series in which the Merseians appeared as well-written although stereotypical green-skinned space opera villains but Anderson later transformed them into a more well-rounded and plausible alien species.)

In "1930, 1950, 1990, 2000," we mentioned that Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history chronology starts with Neil Armstrong in 1969 and that the CoDominium is formed in 1990. It follows from these data alone that, when this chronology was written, 1969 was past and 1990 was future. Future histories reflect their times.