Introductions And Beginnings

What is the best way to introduce and begin a future history series? Right now, I am considering only four such series that I consider important:

The Future History by Robert Heinlein

Cities In Flight by James Blish

The Psychotechnic History by Poul Anderson

The Technic History by Poul Anderson

Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, has both a Preface by its author and an Introduction by the magazine editor of the stories, John W. Campbell, Jr. Although Heinlein in his Preface states that the Future History is not prophecy, Campbell ends his Introduction as follows:

"The important thing is that these, sirs, are high adventure. The high adventure of the years to come - the years we, unfortunately, may not live to see. 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, INTRODUCTION in Robert Heinlein, The Man Who Sold The Moon (London, 1963), pp. 11-14 AT p. 14.

This collection was first published in 1953, seventy years ago. 

Campbell seems:

to assume that his audience is entirely male;

to regard the future as a place where we cannot go rather than as the time that we are always living into;

to forget that this volume at least does not feature interstellar travel.

In fact, in the Future History, the first Moon landing occurs off-stage in the fifth instalment and regular faster than light interstellar travel is about to begin only at the end of Volume IV, the effective end of the history.

Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, set within the Solar System, is about the discoveries that will lead to interstellar travel.

The opening instalment of Anderson's Psychotechnic History is set among the ruins of World War III although, from the second instalment onward, there is a rebuilt high tech Earth and interplanetary travel.

Anderson's Technic History originally began with Trader To The Stars and interstellar travel already under way as proclaimed in the fictional Introduction signed "Le Matelot." The later written earliest story, "The Saturn Game," describes interplanetary exploration during the rebuilding of Earth in the twenty first century.

We have come a long way both in real history and in fictional future histories since The Man Who Sold The Moon but this is all a single literary tradition.