The Early Years Of Two Future Histories

Thank you all for hundreds of page views despite few posts. It is getting too near Christmas for regular posts. I have also had to cancel some other regular activities.

Poul Anderson's The Infinite Voyage has arrived but meanwhile I have got back into rereading some early instalments of Anderson's Psychotechnic History. In Heinlein's Future History, the first four stories are set before space travel. In the Psychotechnic History, just the opening story, "Marius," is. Heinlein's first four stories show technological advances affecting familiar American society whereas "Marius" instead describes European partisans rebuilding among the ruins after World War III, but helped by automation.

In both Histories, Mars is both inhabited and colonized from Earth. Mars is a dry planet and this affects place names. Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways:

"...holed up with the prospectors and archaeologists at How Far? for a month or so, and could probably have stayed forever in exchange for his songs and his accordion playing. But spacemen die if they stay in one place; he hooked a crawler over to Drywater again and thence to Marsopolis.
"The capital was well into its boom..."
-Robert Heinlein, "The Green Hills Of Earth" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 131-141 AT p. 135.

"Barney Rosenberg drove along a dim, rutted trail toward the sheer loom of the escarpment. Around its corner lay Drygulch."
-Poul Anderson, "Un-Man" IN Anderson, The Psychotechnic League (New York, 1981) pp. 31-129 AT p. 39.

Heinlein's History has the "Crazy Years" (The Man Who Sold The Moon, p. 7) between 1951 and the Strike of '66, also the "False Dawn" (ibid.), 1960-70, and the first rocket to the Moon in 1978, whereas the Psychotechnic History has Puritan fanatics emigrating to Mars during the Years of Madness.

"The Green Hills Of Earth" anticipates the freshness of an early age of interplanetary travel whereas Anderson, writing later, seems to be more familiar with space travel - even though it still remains a merely fictional concept.

Space Travel And Time Travel

HG Wells described a single round trip to the Moon in The First Men In The Moon. Robert Heinlein described the financing of the first trip to the Moon in "The Man Who Sold The Moon," then went on to describe regular interplanetary travel in The Green Hills Of Earth.

Wells described a single round trip to the far future in The Time Machine. Poul Anderson described the consequences of the future discovery of time travel in "Time Patrol," then went on to describe regular time travel in the Time Patrol series.

However, regular time travel is considerably more difficult to describe than is regular space travel. There are many space-based series but few time-based series. Substantial though Anderson's Time Patrol series is, it barely scratches the surface of its subject. Time Patrol Specialists spend years or decades in unrecorded periods. Unattached agents travel to whenever they are needed. But what of those later and higher civilizations that send scientists and tourists into the past? We would like to read a series of novels set in such a civilization, when journeys to 1,000,000 BC are as routine as are journeys to Mars for Heinlein's Space Patrol.

The Time Patrol is the police force of several successive time traveling civilizations so there must be stories to be told about those civilizations where, presumably, the Patrol is able to recruit openly instead of approaching prospects discretely and obliquely as it has to do in the earlier periods when the fact of time travel is kept secret.

We could also be told about the interstellar civilization in which the Nine discovered time travel, about the Nine themselves and about the Danellian intervention that prevented the Nine from changing history and established the Patrol. However, this is much more than any one author could have written and I think that experience shows that group approaches to writing sf series do not work well. This would be even more the case with a subject matter that needs to be as finely tuned as time travel, especially in a variable timeline.