More On Future Histories

In non-blog time, I am rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy yet again. In blog-time, I am rereading Poul Anderson's The People Of The Wind although hardly in order to post about it in as much detail as on several previous occasions. I have skipped past some passages because I want to focus on specifically Avalonian characters and settings which do comprise the major part of the text. Rereading this novel generates reflections on American future histories as a whole. For me, the major future historians are Heinlein, Blish, Anderson and Niven with Asimov and Pournelle lagging a considerable distance behind.

Blish's Cities In Flight holds up as a future history series until somewhere in Volume III by which time the antiagathics are keeping a small number of characters alive indefinitely during interstellar flight so that we have ceased to be aware of the passage of historical time on any planetary surface. Essentially this situation also obtains in Anderson's Tau Zero and The Boat Of A Million Years. Blish's The Seedling Stars is a short future history series similar to Anderson's Maurai History, a few stories scattered along a future timeline. Blish's multi-branched Haertel Scholium contains some definite future historical writing but does not comprise a single linear history.

So our attention begins to focus more specifically on Heinlein, Anderson and Niven. And, of course, Anderson.