A Window On Tomorrow

 

John W. Campbell edited:

Robert Heinlein's Future History;

Isaac Asimov's Robots and Foundation;

James Blish's Okie series;

Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League.

 

When Campbell speaks, we listen, even if we then disagree.

 

"These are a window on tomorrow; a television set tuned to the future. But we lack the key to the door that would let us walk through into that future; we must only watch and listen to the highest of all adventures - the conquest of the stars!"

John W. Campbell, Jr., INTRODUCTION IN Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold the Moon (London, 1963), pp. 11-14 AT p. 14.

 

The first story in the Future History, "Life-Line," was published in 1939 and set in 1951. The Man Who Sold The Moon was first published in 1950. Did Campbell believe that he and his readers were permanently confined to the 1950s as if those years were a place, not a decade? The mid-point of Heinlein's Future History Chart is:

 

2025 (The Stone Pillow)

(Brackets indicate a "story-to-be-told.")

Thus, some of us who were alive in the 1950s have "walked" through nearly the first half of the Future History Chart simply by living long enough. And The Man Who Sold The Moon does not show "the conquest of the stars!" The first four of its six stories are Earthbound. The first Moon landing happens in the fourth story in 1978 although Heinlein's PREFACE says that it could be sooner. The first interstellar round trip does not happen until the fourth of five volumes.

 

Sure, interstellar travel is a major factor in American future histories although some, like Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's Maurai History, take a while to get there.