Closer And Later Perspectives

Poul Anderson's Fire Time was published in 1974. I suppose that the fictional future of the novel diverges from our real remembered timeline as of that date although we tend to say that a future history becomes an alternative history only when real events noticeably diverge from fictional events. Notionally, any futuristic novel has our contemporary events in its past so that, e.g., a new Technic History instalment could present characters reflecting on the British and American elections of 2024 although, if they did that, then we would want their perspective to be very different from that of anyone in our here and now. But it would be difficult to imagine how anyone several millennia in our future would view our current issues. The alternative present of Alan Moore's Watchmen includes a character saying that the US would have gone mad as a nation if it had lost in Vietnam. But that is a very close alternative present. Chunderban Desai would have to look back at the first quarter of the twenty-first century from a considerable distance although he does comment perceptively on the Polesotechnic League.