Ways To The Future

HG Wells' The First Men In The Moon did not initiate a Wellsian series about interplanetary travel although it could have done. Wells preferred to conclude a one-off work with an explanation of why there had been no further space travel, time travel or deep sea exploration. Titles like The War In The Air, The War Of The Worlds, The World Set Free, The Food Of The Gods, Men Like Gods and The Shape Of Things To Come read as if they could have been instalments of a long series although instead each is an independent work. 

Jules Verne's From The Earth To The Moon and Round The Moon are two volumes of a long series about extraordinary voyages under the Earth, under the sea, around the Earth, through the air and around the Solar System. Thus: a series, yes; into the future, no.

Robert Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, is like a development from Wells' and Verne's Moon titles. Heinlein's character not only travels to the Moon but makes money from it. Volume I recounts technological advances, including rocketry and the first Moon landing, in the second half of the twentieth century. We could recapitulate the opening instalments of Isaac Asimov's, James Blish's and Larry Niven's future histories but we have already done so!

Our current concern, of course, is interplanetary and interstellar exploration in the three opening instalments of Poul Anderson's Technic History. Read them and remember their predecessors.