Five Future History Collections

The Past Through Tomorrow by Robert Heinlein

The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov

Cities In Flight by James Blish

The Earth Book Of Stormgate by Poul Anderson

Tales Of Known Space by Larry Niven

- five collections by the four Campbell future historians and one of their successors. We will compare the collections by Anderson and Niven after contrasting them with those by Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.

Heinlein's original Future History was complete in five volumes. The Past Through Tomorrow, published in both one- and two-volume editions, collects the contents of those earlier volumes with a few additions and omissions. Blish's Okie series, collected in a single volume, Earthman, Come Home, acquired a prequel, a sequel and a juvenile novel and Cities In Flight collects the contents of these four volumes. Thus, Heinlein's and Blish's future history series have each been unified into a single volume.

Although we appreciate the Future History and Cities In Flight, we ideally prefer a future history series to be too long to fit into a single volume. Heinlein's is probably the longest that could have become uni-volumed. Although The Foundation Trilogy does collect the entire original Foundation series and does cover a long enough period of fictional history to count as a future history series in its own right, it nevertheless remains just one small part of its author's complete future history.

Although Anderson's Earth Book is not his entire Technic History and Niven's Tales is not his entire Known Space future history, neither of these collections covers just a single historical period either. Instead, they are to some extent what I call "representative volumes" for their respective future histories.

To be continued.