Daily Life In Future Histories

The Future History by Robert Heinlein
The Psychotechnic History by Poul Anderson
The Technic History by Poul Anderson

This is what I call the "future history triad." We already know, first, that Poul Anderson directly modeled his Psychotechnic History on Heinlein's Future History and, secondly, that Anderson's unplanned Technic History grew organically to become a future history series on a similar model but a vaster scale. However, merely to say that is to overlook something unique about the Future History. It has been said that this series gives the future a daily life.

Volumes I and II of the Future History are primarily "social" whereas Volumes III and IV are primarily "political." (For this distinction within future histories, see here.) Volume V, a brief appendix about events elsewhere, does not advance the History. In the first and "social" part of the Future History:

there are only short stories;

they are set in the second half of the twentieth century and the early twenty first century;

in general, there are no continuing characters - although Harriman appears twice;

the space rocket technology in the stories is extrapolated from the science and technology known at the time of writing;

thus, this could have been what was going to happen in the next few decades - apart from the less plausible extraterrestrials who, however, do not impinge greatly on human history;

the characters are an individual, a couple, a family, a crew etc living and working in those decades;

the narration addresses a reading public living in the same period;

politics are in the background - there is an attempted coup by a faction in the Space Patrol and, later, the UN metamorphoses into a World Federation;

in Volume II, the stories do not advance chronologically but show different aspects of the same contemporaneous society.

Examples:

"Sure we had trouble building Space Station One - but the trouble was people."
-Robert Heinlein, "Delilah And The Space Rigger" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 7-19 AT p. 7.

"You've seen pictures of the Station -..."
-op. cit., p. 13.

"The traveling public gripes at the lack of direct Earth-to-Moon service..."
-Robert Heinlein, "Space Jockey" IN The Green Hills Of Earth, pp. 19-36 AT p. 20.

"It has only been in the past five years that [Supra-New York space station] has even been equipped to offer the comfort of one-gravity centrifuge service..."
-ibid., p. 21.

"You sang [Rhysling's] words in school..."
-Robert Heinlein, "The Green Hills of Earth" IN The Green Hills Of Earth, pp. 131-141 AT p. 131.

I think that it is fair to say that there is nothing like this in other future histories? I have said occasionally, e.g., here and here, that I would like to know more about life on Earth during the Solar Commonwealth and the Terran Empire. I value "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" for its glimpses of domestic life during the Commonwealth.