Eleven Future Historians

A future history can be about human beings interacting with each other, with alien intelligences or with artificial intelligences and always with their cosmic environment. Poul Anderson's nine future histories address all these options. They, together with his time travel narratives and cosmological sf, complete a substantial literary tradition. (My opinion, of course.)

In HG Wells's The Shape Of Things To Come, mankind remakes itself with science in the twenty first and twenty second centuries whereas, in CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength, the project of mankind remaking itself through science is revealed to be literally diabolical.

Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men recounts the entire future history of mankind, including interactions with Martians and Venerians.

Stapledon's Star Maker recounts cosmic and creational history, summarizing Last And First Men in a single sentence.

In Brian Aldiss's Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand, evolution in our galaxy ends with man and, in the next galaxy, starts with man. (Non-Darwinian evolution, obviously.)

In A Short History Of The Future by RC Churchill, Orwell's, Huxley's, Bradbury's, Vonnegut's etc dystopias are shoehorned into a single narrative. (Huxley: Ape And Essence, not Brave New World.)

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, technological progress is accompanied by social regression although there is an eventual advance toward the first mature civilization. Martians, Venerians and other Solar races are present but peripheral even though the possibility of contact with non-human intelligences had been one of the Man Who Sold The Moon's many selling points.

Isaac Asimov connected his Robots series, about human-AI interactions, with his Foundation series, about a predictive science of society.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, cities fly with anti-gravity while human beings live indefinitely with antiagathics but cannot survive the end of the universe.

In Blish's The Seedling Stars, as in Last And First Men, human beings are adapted to extraterrestrial environments.

In Blish's The Quincunx Of Time, messages from the future help to bring about an intergalactic utopia.

In Larry Niven's Known Space future history, human beings turn out to be mutated Pak breeder colonists of a former Slaver food planet and eventually become genetically lucky while meanwhile interacting with kzinti, Puppeteers etc. (Thus, we are not who we thought we were and we become someone else in any case.)

In Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history, mankind exports war and imperialism to the galaxy and encounters one alien race.

Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is about whether mankind can remake itself with a science of the psyche and society. There are some human-alien interactions.

Anderson's Technic History is both about the cycles of human civilizations and about many human-alien interactions.

Anderson's Maurai future history is about whether mankind can survive after nearly destroying its environment.

Anderson's Kith and Flying Mountains future histories are about mankind in space. In Starfarers, the Kith novel, time dilated space travelers interact with aliens while civilizations rise and fall on Earth.

In Anderson's Rustum future history, ideological conflict on Earth leads to extra-solar exile and colonization.

In Anderson's Directorate future history, as in his Rustum history, human beings colonize extra-solar planets despite traveling between planetary systems at only sub-light speeds.

Anderson's Harvest Of Stars future history and Genesis are about human-AI interactions.

I was reminded of Anderson's first, Psychotechnic, future history when, while rereading Harvest Of Stars, Volume II, I came across:

"...purely human politics, short-sighted, ignorant, superstitious, animally impassioned, forever repeated the same ghastly mistakes."

-The Stars Are Also Fire, 21, p. 277.

 

The revolt of the primitive against the unnatural state of civilization is the "protean enemy," opposed by psychotechnicians.