For purposes of teaching history in an interstellar spacecraft, important dates are listed as:
1492
1776
1969
2002
That last must have been the discovery of gyrogravitics. History becomes future history or, now, alternative history. Other important sf dates have been:
1964 Fred Hoyle's Black Cloud entered the Solar System
1984 need I say more?
1999 Dan Dare
2000 AD, an sf comic, still published
2001 comment unnecessary
2018 Volume I of James Blish's Cities In Flight, anti-gravity and antiagathics
2049-'50 Blish's A Case Of Conscience
2100 (approximately) Heinlein's Second American Revolution
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Poul Anderson tended to be sparing in his use of explicit dates for his books and stories. Aside from his Time Patrol stories and THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS, I don't remember him using dates very often. The only story in his Technic Civilization stories dated with a YEAR was "The Saturn Game," prefaced with a quote from a scholarly article pub. by the still fictional Apollo University on the Moon in AD 2057. Which means the events recorded in "Saturn" probably occurred two or three years earlier.
Sean
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