Writing A Future History

An sf author may continue to add new instalments to a future history series throughout his career. Further, the order of writing and publication need not correspond to the chronological order of fictional events although we prefer to read the series in the latter order. Thus, we pass back and forth between earlier and later phases of the author's development as a writer. Thus, further, the series is not written in a uniform or homogeneous style and therefore reads more like a real history. We learn to distinguish between earlier and later fictional events and also between earlier and later accounts of such events.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the later written "The Pirate" is followed by the earlier written The Peregrine and "The Chapter Ends" and these three works complete the History. We read about:

a Stellar Union Coordinator;
that Coordinator joining the interstellar Nomads;
a post-Nomads Galactic civilization.

Important events occur first within a single lifetime, then many thousands of years later. Thus, a future history is constructed. "The Pirate" adds an imaginative non-humanoid alien, the information that the hyperdrive is also called the tachyon mode and this History's equivalent of the hypnoprobe, called electronic brainphasing.