Wells and Stapledon wrote before we were born. Published in 1945 and set loosely after the war, CS Lewis's That Hideous Strength is an imaginative Christian reply to Wellsian/Stapledonian anthropocentric extrapolations.
American future histories are embedded in our lifetimes if we are old enough. The opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set in 1951. His second volume is set around 2000. Larry Niven's Known Space History opens with:
"...the near future, the exploration of interplanetary space during the next quarter-century."
-Larry Niven, Tales Of Known Space (New York, 1975), p. xii.
That quarter-century is 1975-2000. Niven wrote in 1975 that:
"The Known Space series is now complete." (ibid., p. 223)
It was not. But think about 1975. It is now fifty years ago.
James Blish's Cities In Flight opens with Year 2018!
In Poul Anderson's main future history series, the early twenty-first century is:
"...a violent period of global unrest known as the Chaos."
-Sandra Miesel, CHRONOLOGY OF TECHNIC CIVILIZATION IN Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 795-804 AT p. 795.
We are not out of that yet!
Anderson's Genesis, published in 2000, summarizes past human history, then proceeds through billions of years in a galactic future of post-organic intelligences that will not be superseded either in our lifetimes or for a very long time after that.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Indeed, we are not out of our Time of Chaos or Warring States era. The Chaos of the Technic timeline finally ended when the Solar Commonwealth arose around AD 2100 to forcibly impose some order and unity on Earth. I have seen suggestions that if the US became an associate member of the British Commonwealth that would immediately make it conceivable the BC could become the nucleus around which Terra becomes unified. A real world Anglosphere could lead to that!
As so often, similar ideas can be found in Anderson's works. In the Hoka stories written by him and Dickson, "The Sheriff of Canyon Gulch" quotes from Adalbert Parr's ORIENTATION MANUAL how the Accession of the US to the British Commonwealth helped lead to the rise of a global state called the United Commonwealths. And the background of the Hoka stories makes it plain the United Commonwealths/Interbeing League was very libertarian.
Ad astra! Sean
One lesson from earlier future histories is... don't go into detail about the immediate future!
'tis why I always use alternate histories for the near-future stuff.
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