What did I miss? I started with Heinlein. HG Wells had time travel, space travel, Martian invasion and future history in separate volumes whereas Olaf Stapledon incorporated these four themes into a single volume and made it a complete future history, then added a cosmic history, thus making himself an ultimate sf writer.
The cosmological timescale of Poul Anderson's Genesis makes it a Stapledonian future history that has not yet dated and that might even be date-proof. Genesis incorporates interplanetary and interstellar travel but neither extraterrestrials nor time travel. However, it does feature "emulations" (conscious simulations) of historical and alternative historical periods. I argued somewhere else on the blog that the emulations might include even the Time Patrol mutable timeline.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Your comment that "The cosmological timescale of Poul Anderson's GENESIS makes it a Stapledonian future history that has not yet dated and that might even be date-proof" interests me. But I can see why that might be so, considering how that story has speculations on things like AIs and the uploading of human personalities into artificial neural networks that I'm skeptical will even be possible. If some of these fascinating ideas remains merely speculative then GENESIS will not become dated any time soon.
Sean
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