Future Historical Fiction

Many sf narratives are simply set in our future with no reference to time travel and therefore with no possibility, even in fictional terms, of the story being transmitted from the time in which its events occur to that in which we read about them. Maybe authors needed time to realize that they could completely detach their fictional futures from our shared present in this way? Both Wells and Stapledon invented devices by which their future histories were transmitted to the twentieth century.

One premise of Poul Anderson's main future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, is that many of its installments are published as works of historical fiction within the future history. Thus, "The Star Plunderer," about Manuel Argos, the Founder of the Terran Empire, is preceded by an Introduction which states that the story may be pure fiction and that it can be read as historical fiction but also that its author (Rear Admiral John Reeves, not Poul Anderson) must have been trying to give a true picture of a man who was a legend in his own time in that triumphant age.

Anderson presses all the right buttons here:

a military memoir;

pure fiction;

historical fiction;

a true picture;

a legend;

even a legend in his own time;

an age described as great, tragic and triumphant.

Then we read the story and accept it as fact within the fiction.

Earlier in the Technic History, The Earth Book Of Stormgate not only collects twelve previously published works but also adds new introductions to these works as published by a member of the Stormgate Choth on Avalon. Thus, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," originally published (as far as we are concerned) in an original anthology of juvenile sf, now becomes an extract from the reminiscences of its first person narrator who had settled on another extra-solar planet later in life and Avalonian readers are referred to Library Central 254-0691 for a glossary of obscure terms. Multiple narrative layers and verisimilitude.