The Past Of Future Histories

In Robert Heinlein's "The Man Who Sold The Moon," the title character, DD Harriman, lives underground in an elaborate nuclear air raid shelter. In Poul Anderson's Genesis, Laurinda Ashcroft also lives underground although, above her technologically equipped dwelling, there is an artificially created preserve on the former site of a genetically engineered plantation where, before that, there was an ugly industrial town. Thus, future histories move with the times.

James Blish's After Such Knowledge is not a future history but a multi-genre trilogy comprising one historical novel, one contemporary fantasy and one futuristic sf novel. In Volume III, set in 2049-2050, almost the entire Terrestrial population lives in underground city-states that are massive, self-contained Shelters which have long outlasted the threat of nuclear war but cannot now be disassembled or decommissioned. When Blish wrote this novel, that was a conceivable future.

Thus, Blish's global Shelter economy is intermediate between Heinlein's nuclear threat, solved by the Space Patrol, and Anderson's later world concerned with preserving the environment. Maybe we are living into the consequences of not preserving the environment?

Ad astra?