Back In 2012

While writing the previous post, Fictional Futures, I had temporarily forgotten that, back in 2012, when I had just begun to blog, I presented and discussed some "notes towards a future history":

"A SPECTRE Is Haunting Europa"

Influences On "SPECTRE"

There is no way that I can write any of that. Furthermore, any competent writer who did try to construct any parts of this proposed series would have to share, or at least to have some inner resonance with, certain political ideas and sympathies. It is not going to happen. Nevertheless, the proposed series visibly parallels Robert Heinlein's Future History and later works by Poul Anderson.

In 2012, I believed, mainly following some later works by Anderson, that extra-solar life was probably rare. Nowadays, exoplanets are known to abound. Anyone beginning to write a future history series at this late stage is able to start with a completely different set of premises. But I have not kept up with twenty-first century sf so I do not really know what speculative writers are doing nowadays. Meanwhile, real history remains dynamic and chaotic and contemporary novels featuring regular use of smartphones, comsats and the Internet would have been sf if published a few decades ago.

"We do not know where we are going..."

-Le Matelot.