Fictions And Futures

Fictional futures are diverse but also kind of parallel, at least in our imaginations. We can find similarities despite the vast differences between HG Wells' AD 802,701 and Poul Anderson's AD 2497. I could write a long list of futuristic speculations but so could any sf reader. And we imagine further works of fiction to link the existing ones despite their diversity. But, of course, sf writers have already done this. There are different ways to do it. Sometimes two originally independent series have been fitted into a single timeline, e.g.:

van Rijn and Flandry;

Robots and Foundation;

Lucas Garner and Beowulf Shaeffer;

Sherlock Holmes and the Time Patrol.

 

Usually, works of fiction by different authors remain fictions to each other, e.g.:

 

Anderson's Tom Barlow is relieved not to have emerged in an Orwellian dictatorship;

 

Wells' Star-Begotten refers to his The War Of The Worlds as a work of fiction - written by someone like Olaf Stapledon;

 

Stapledon's Last Men In London manages to be a work of fiction within itself because its author among the First Men, who imagines that he is writing fiction, distorts most of the information that he mentally receives from his Neptunian observer;

 

Anderson's Maurai future history is fiction within his There Will Be Time, again based on information received from a time traveler - while another such time traveler had given Wells the time travel idea.