Dates In Future Histories

I was born on 1st January, 1949. A legal document in "Life-Line," the opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History, is dated 2nd April, 1951. Thus, when I began to read the Future History in the 1960's, its first part was already past. At that time, I thought of the year 2000 as "the future," when there would be spaceships, but more like another place than another time. There was not yet any real appreciation that, barring accidents, I would become a denizen of that remote year merely by living long enough. Even 1984 seemed remote. Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud, first published in 1957, begins in 1964 but is bookended by fictional correspondence dated 2020 and 2021, far in the future. Heinlein's Time Chart has the first Moon landing in 1978, Lunar, Martian and Venerian colonies by 2000 and the Second American Revolution in 2075 so that part is still future.

Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium Chronology begins with Armstrong and Aldrin on the Moon in 1969 and they are also referred to in Poul Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire. History helps future histories.

The earliest year in James Blish's Chronology of Cities in Flight is 2012. The first of the antiagathics is discovered in 2018, "Colonials" leave the Solar System in 2021 and the Cold Peace begins in 2022. Thereafter this Chronology remains "future" - just.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, UN world government is established in 1965 and replaced by the Solar Union in 2105. In Anderson's Technic History, the opening story quotes a document dated 2057. We continue to approach or encroach on the fiction.

A Romany palm reader told me that I would live until the age of 95. I provisionally accept what such people say because they have previously said things that were true. However, if I make it to 100 and 101, then I will have reached the dates of Books One and Two of James Blish's A Case of Conscience.