Ancient Futures

Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288.

Much sf, including the works in question, presents almost a contradictory scenario. On the one hand, a technologically advanced civilization exists in the far future. On the other hand, it is an ancient civilization with an overwhelming sense of a long past. Thus, anyone who time travels into the far future arrives from a far past. The present, of course, is an entirely relative concept. I know that this is obvious but I am trying to articulate the contrasting connotations involved.

Also, with the mere passage of time, any work of futuristic fiction recedes to an earlier period and can become dated. Poul Anderson's "Flight to Forever," about all of the future, was published in 1950 in the Golden Age of pulp sf, a period that we look back to with nostalgia if we are old enough. I was one year old at the time. (A novel called 1984 was published in 1949, the year of my birth. "Flight to Forever" was collected in Past Times, published in 1984. I think that the paradoxical term "past futures" becomes relevant here.)

In 50,000 AD, the massive stone fortress of Brontothor, with its "...donjon..." (p. 252), exists in an Ice Age caused not by geology but by "...a weapon...which consumed atmospheric carbon dioxide." (p. 256)

Past and future blend together. The time travelers and their hosts confer in a room which:

"...had been made livable, hung with tapestries and carpeted with skins. Fluorotubes cast a white light over it, and a fire crackled cheerfully in the hearth. Had it not been for the wind against the windows, they might have forgotten where they were." (pp. 254-255)

They should be able to forget when they are because this scene could have occurred in many past eras, especially the crackling fire. They are the remnant of an ancient and nearly dead empire - but it is the Galactic Empire and they are surrounded by consequences of interactions with extrasolar species:

there are non-humans among them;

the Ixchulhi had conquered Earth and built the massive pyramid inside which the time projector was trapped for twenty thousand years;

Brontothor was built seven thousand years previously by the Grimanni "...and blasted out of action a millennium later..." (p. 257);

the last, half million year old, member of "...the fantastically old and evolved race of the planet called Vro-Hi..." (p. 242) survives in the caverns and tunnels beneath Brontothor;

the hostile Anvardi are approaching the Solar System.

The perennial sf theme of a rising and falling interstellar empire is addressed and this time the Vro-Hian, applying "'...scientific psychodynamics...,'" has "'...proved rigorously that permanence is a self-contradictory concept.'" (p. 262)

Earlier, Saunders had reflected that human works were impermanent:

"...he thought with a sadness of the cities and civilizations he had seen rise and spend their little hour and sink back into the night and chaos of time." (p. 238)

The Vro-Hian confirms that this must always be so. But imagine the ability to travel through that night and chaos!