Truly A Future History

At the beginning of Poul Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, there is a World Federation on Earth and an Avantist dictatorship in North America, there are adapted human beings, Lunarians, on the Moon and robots on the doomed planet Demeter in the Alpha Centaurian system. There is no artificial intelligence yet although a first step towards AI has been taken with the downloading of human personalities into artificial neural systems.

Three volumes later, AI dominates the "Synesis" that has replaced the Federation. There are colonies on Mars, in the Outer System and in four other systems although Demeter, after a thousand years of colonisation, has been destroyed by the predicted planetary collision.

Between these points, we have seen how:

the Fireball company opened up space;

the Lunarians originated, gained and lost independence on the Moon but spread to Alpha Centauri, Mars and the Kuiper Belt;

Fireball and the Lunarians overthrew the Avantists, although this strengthened the Federation which later made way for the Synesis;

the Demetrian colonists learned how to guide a newly introduced ecology by integrating a downloaded intelligence into it;

such presiding intelligences learned how re-incarnate downloaded personalities in newly grown human bodies on each newly terraformed planet;

the Demetrian plan to fill the cosmos with unpredictably diverse organic life comes into conflict with the terrestrial cybercosm's plan to understand and control the cosmos in order ultimately to survive and transcend it;

cybercosmic robotic probes in light speed ships spy on the extrasolar colonies, thus setting the scene for open conflict between organic and inorganic intelligences.

We have come a long way from the faster then light interstellar trade and imperialism of Anderson's Technic History. However, Anderson continues to address fundamental questions about the nature of life, humanity and society.