Sunday 30 May 2021

Overlappping Future Histories

We might deconstruct future histories and reassemble their components in different combinations.

(i) See the previous post.

(ii) "The Chapter Ends," presented as the culmination of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, and "The Star Plunderer," a pivotal story in Anderson's Technic History, refer to Sol City and the First Empire and might constitute a short third future history.

(iii) The second Rustum History volume, New America, presents "Home" as if it were set in the Rustum timeline whereas in fact it belongs with a few other stories in a more diffuse future history. See here.

(iv) Five early Scribner Juveniles by Robert Heinlein are consistent with each other and with the The Green Hills Of Earth period of Heinlein's Future History, even referring to Rhysling, Dahlquist and the Lunar family of Stone.

(v) Films of James Blish's novels might (this is my idea) have combined the Haertel overdrive with the spindizzy. See here.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

About the only thing I can really think of just now for this blog piece is that we never see a Second Terran Empire in the Technic timeline. No Second Empire is mentioned in "Starfog," the latest of the stories in that alternate history, set more than 4000 years after Flandry's time. True, the story is distant in space as well as time, being set several galactic arms away from where the Empire once ruled.

Ad astra! Sean