Technological Progress In Future Histories

The future begins tomorrow so it matters when sf is written. HG Wells' Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that he has travelled through "tomorrow" (the following day), then further into "futurity." But he said that in the late nineteenth century, when the only manned flight was with balloons, so his "tomorrow" is now one with Lewis Carroll's "...sunny sky...In an evening of July -" Wellsian anticipations become our nostalgia. 

There is no spaceflight in Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come although the film, Things Of Come, ends with a space launch. In Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men, later human races eventually traverse the Solar System, colonizing Venus, then Neptune, but go no further although there is slower than light interstellar travel in Stapledon's cosmic history, Star Maker. 

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, which begins in 1951, the first Moon landing does not happen until the fourth instalment and interstellar travel is by generation ships although a mathematical genius on the second extra-solar expedition invents a faster than light drive but this exists only in Volume IV.

Wells, Stapledon and Heinlein have taken time to get off the ground. After that, American future histories usually start with space travel. Larry Niven's Known Space future history series begins with interplanetary exploration. Poul Anderson's Technic History began with interstellar exploration until "The Saturn Game," about interplanetary exploration, was retconned. Blog readers know of other examples.

Regarding Anderson's Technic History and Genesis as culminations, I will end there, although never forgetting the Time Traveller.