Present And Future

Fiction is historical, contemporary or futuristic. How often do fictional characters experience the transition from "the present" to "the future"? For Poul Anderson's characters in Brain Wave, it has to be the moment when their intelligence increases. Before that, they are living in what the reader recognizes as the present. After that, they are launched into a future of technological advances, including automation and FTL interstellar travel, and social upheaval.

The Time Traveler tells his dinner guests:

"'The night came like the turning out of a lamp, and in another moment came tomorrow.'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 4, p. 24.

In the Preface to That Hideous Strength, dated Christmas Eve, 1943, published 1945, CS Lewis tells us that:

"The period of this story is vaguely 'after the war'."
-CS Lewis, That Hideous Strength IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 349-753 AT p. 354.

Thus, the original readers knew that the characters were living in a vaguely defined but close future although the characters themselves did not see it that way.

The protagonists of James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, living in our future, receive messages from successive periods of their future.

Apart from its Epilogue, Julian May's Intervention ends:

"...the New Hampshire sky was filled with the thousands of starships of the Galactic Milieu, and the Great Intervention had begun."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 32, p. 665.