Ancient Futures

When a work of science fiction presents a future civilization that is already ancient before the story has even begun, then we can simultaneously appreciate two contradictory temporal perspectives. We, the author and his readers, imaginatively or speculatively contemplate our remote future while the characters might either reflectively or nostalgically contemplate a remote past.

"Thirty-first millennium. Outlaws after the failure of the Exaltationists to cast off the weight of a civilization grown older than the Old Stone Age was to me."

(Poul Anderson, Time Patrol, New York, 2006, p. 279)

Anderson wrote his Time Patrol series in the second millennium. His imagined thirty-first millennium is an era of genetic engineering, interstellar travel and time travel, this third discovery having been made in the twentieth millennium. Yet the genetically superior Exaltationists feel oppressed by, and try to overthrow, a civilization that to them resembles the Stone Age in terms of antiquity.

In Anderson's Technic Civilization History, Dominic Flandry refers to Imperial Terra as ancient, an impression heightened by the revival of the Latin name for Earth. He and the queen of a conquered species watch as:

"...the first of the descending Imperial ships glittered in heaven like a falling star." (Captain Flandry, Riverdale, NY, 2010, p. 276)

Two phrases here suggest antiquity. First, the application of the adjective "Imperial" to spaceships combines the senses of a long past and of a far future. Secondly, falling stars were known, although not understood, by the earliest inhabitants of Earth and also presumably of terrestroid planets like the one in this story. What do falling stars portend? Here, this ancient sight portends a changed future for an entire planet...