Looking Back At Looking Forward

I remember my father saying, "D-Day was twenty years ago," as if that was a long time. Now it is sixty five years ago. That is a long time. Back then, I was entirely focused on the future through reading science fiction. I would have read a novel set in 2020 rather than a history of 1945.

In 1999, Poul Anderson imagined his character, Steven Matuchek, in about 1945. See the previous post. Thus, sf writers look not only forward but also backward and sideways. But now let us look forward again. What shape would the Earth of the goetic universe be in by 2020? We imagined back then that space travel would have become common by now. If goetics has enabled Valeria and her generation to avoid some of our problems, then what other problems would they have had instead? Notionally, that Earth still exists in its fictional or parallel realm. It did not cease to exist at the end of Operation Luna. Valeria is now sixty-nine and her parents are long dead. The generation that was alive during World War II is passing away. World War I veterans are gone by now. We can imagine similar changes in the goetic universe although usually we stop thinking about it as soon as we reach the end of the novel.