Consistency And Continuity

We appreciate consistency in future history series. This is the Heinlein model which Poul Anderson consciously copied in his Psychotechnic History, then unexpectedly reproduced on a vaster spatiotemporal scale in his Technic History.

(In graphic fiction universes, consistency is "continuity" but cross-continuity character consistency is more fundamental. We always recognise Clark Kent.)

In Heinlein's five-volume Future History, Volume IV, Methuselah's Children, refers to the contents of every other volume, even including V. In the opening story, "Life-Line," Dr. Hugo Pinero, inventor of the baronovitameter, will, for a fee, accurately predict the date of anyone's death. However, in Methuselah's Children, the immortal Lazarus Long says that Pinero had returned his fee without giving him a prediction. This is perfect future history consistency.

In Anderson's Technic History, every instalment is either directly or indirectly connected to every other instalment. As a single example:

in the opening instalment, "The Saturn Game," Jean Broberg has been brought up as a Jerusalem Catholic;

in the thirty-ninth instalment, The Game Of Empire, the Wodenite Jerusalem Catholic priest, Fr. Axor, meets Dominic Flandry;

in the twenty-seventh instalment, The Rebel Worlds, Flandry had expelled Aenean rebels from the Terran Empire;

in the forty-third and concluding instalment, "Starfog," we are not explicitly told but nevertheless understand that the long-isolated Kirkasanters are descendants of those expelled rebels.

That, of course, is a long line of indirect connections. There is no direct link between Broberg and Kirkasant but the whole of history is a single multiply detailed process.

Instalments of a future history sometimes refer not only to earlier instalments but also to earlier history which also provides a common background to contemporary fiction. Anderson's Terran Empire is modelled on the Roman Empire. Futuristic sf often refers to Einstein either to describe slower than light interstellar travel, because of Einstein's light-speed limit, or to explain how that limit has been broken.

James Blish created Adolph Haertel whose faster than light interstellar overdrive supersedes Einsteinian relativity. Haertel, like Einstein, is referred to in several of Blish's fictional futures, thus generating a sense of historical verisimilitude within this single author's works. 

Blish wrote a historical novel, Doctor Mirabilis, about Roger Bacon and referred to Bacon in a contemporary fantasy, Black Easter, and in a futuristic sf novel, The Triumph Of Time.

Earth and Mars exist in alternative futures and so can fictional planets. Lithia explodes in 2050 in Blish's A Case Of Conscience but still exists millennia later in his The Seedling Stars.

Any future history series can be conceptualized as part of a process with past history and alternative futures.

This week, I will travel to London on Thursday morning and return to Lancaster on Sunday evening so there will be a blog break.