Miniature Histories

"Epilogue."

Many single novels or even shorter works turn out to be miniature future histories when analysed in detail, e.g.:

"Flight to Forever"

"In Memoriam"

"Requiem"

The Long Way Home

The Time Machine

When travellers from the twentieth century arrive in the far future, they ask: How did it happen? How did Victorian bourgeoisie and proletarians become Eloi and Morlocks? Or: How did beings like Zero come into existence? (It is not just the twentieth century, of course. The Time Traveller was from the nineteenth. Characters contemporary with their readers now set off from the twenty-first.)

In a boat descending from the returned Traveler, Sam Kuroki unwittingly explains. There were many self-maintaining gadgets including solar powered, self-reproducing, mineral-collecting sea rafts. Hugh Darkington adds:

"'There would have been radioactivity everywhere...'" (ibid.)

Radioactivity, mutation and adaptation.