Backtrack: CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength, published in 1945, is set after the war, another day after tomorrow. There was one technological innovation, a pragmatometer, an information processor, described as a marvelous gadget. (I am not about to seek out the precise quotation at this time of night.) That Hideous Strength is not a future history but is a Christian response to Wellsian and Stapledonian secularist future histories.
Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, modelled directly on the Future History, begins very soon, in the aftermath of World WAR III. The world has regressed - except that a new science of society is being applied and is helping the recovery.
Anderson's Technic History started with FTL interstellar exploration - except that a single story about interplanetary exploration in the outer Solar System was added later.
This is a partial history of future histories and is all that I am going to write tonight!
(Past futures are big time nostalgic.)
2 comments:
You're right about that. SF has stopped doing future histories beginning immediately -- though near-future SF is common enough. People trying to -predict- the future has gone downhill, though.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I hope we live to see SF written at a time when actual space ships are going back and forth from Earth to the Moon, Mars, O'Neill habitats, etc. We could say that makes SF "present history."
It also amuses me how Anderson had one of his characters in SATAN'S WORLD mentioning that science fiction convention being held on the Moon.
Ad astra! Sean
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