2319

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

In "Time Patrol," Manson Everard meets an Academy instructor born in 9573, another who is a veteran of the Martian war of 3890 and a Danellian from more than a million years hence;

in "Gibraltar Falls," he meets Feliz a Rach of the First Matriarchy two millennia hence;

in "Delenda Est," he is with "Piet Van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early twenty-fourth A.D.)" (p. 174);

in "Ivory, And Apes, And Peacocks," he meets the director of Jerusalem Base between the birth of David and the fall of Judah, who "...was born in twenty-ninth century New Edom on Mars..." and is a veteran of the Second Asteroid War. (p. 307)

However, all of these encounters occur in our past. Only in a single passage, 2319 (pp. 374-378), does the action of the Time Patrol series move beyond the twentieth century or even beyond the date of publication of the current story.

The information about the future is necessary background for stories about journeys from the present to the past. Also, Anderson is not only an imaginative but also a restrained writer. In his multi-volume future history, the Technic Civilization series, he never tells us why the Ancients/Chereionites had disappeared or died out or even whether the last Chereionite, Aycharaych, survived the bombardment of his home planet.

That single excursion to 2319, approximately contemporaneous with Van Sarawak, is a surprise that divulges little:

a hospital on the Moon has artificial gravity, scented air and a carpeted floor;
an electronic skullcap gives hours of sleep;
a window or screen shows mountains, craters and a black sky with a full white and blue Earth.

On p. 379, Carl is back in 302.