Anderson does not draw a straight line from nuclear forces to physiologies to psychologies to sociology. In Isaac Asimov's future history, Seldon's psychohistorical Plan is upset, although only temporarily, by a single mutant whereas Anderson's Psychotechnic Institute is, much more realistically, overwhelmed by the chaos of world events. And it is the science of psychotechnics, not any particular organization, that survives into the Galactic future.
The Foundation series remains throughout with a handful of individuals directing the destinies of quintillions whereas Anderson's Psychotechnic History is a genuine future history series with different kinds of stories about diverse one-off characters set in successive periods of a single long timeline.
The Psychotechnic League should be entitled The Psychotechnic Institute or The Psychotechnic History, Volume I. This series should be republished in a uniform edition between Robert Heinlein's Future History and Anderson's Technic History. This is the main line of development of American future history series.
2 comments:
The "science of history" thing was popular in the middle twentieth century; it's gotten steadily less so, because it's self-evidently fatuous if you actually study history, which is a web of low-probability accidents.
"...self-evidently fatuous..." We get good writing here without having to pay for it!
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