Into The Future

Presumably we do have one single linear future stretching ahead of us. We just do not know what it is. We can imagine traveling into that future but can only imagine, not predict, what we would find then. Wells's Time Traveler, Poul Anderson's Martin Saunders and Damon Knight's Gordon Naismith each embark on a journey into and through their future which is necessarily unique to them. However, an sf writer would now maybe be able to describe Wells's late nineteenth century Time Traveler proceeding through successive decades of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries and stopping in 2021 to try to make sense of what he has seen so far.

I think that Poul Anderson would have been eminently qualified to write such an account although he would not have been able to carry the story as far as 2021, at least not in the terms that I am talking about, i.e., applying knowledge of the actual course of events: retro-future time travel.