When Lucas escapes, goes elsewhere and interacts with other characters, the narrative moves quickly and again is filled with historical and geographical references, more of these than we can cope with this evening although we expect that we will soon return to them.
It is a commonplace that the early part of a future history series is soon contradicted by our advancing reality although this has not yet happened to Poul Anderson's Technic History and will never happen to his Genesis. We sometimes compare Anderson's several future histories to each other and also to those of other authors including, for obvious reasons, Robert Heinlein.
Another possible comparison is with CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength which is not a future history but is nevertheless relevant to this discussion because it addresses conflicting visions of the future of mankind and is Lewis' reply to Wells' and Stapledon's single-volume future histories. Published in 1945 and set vaguely after the war, Lewis' novel describes a crisis that did not occur in post-war Britain. Thus, it soon became an alternative history. The fictional crisis occurred in a fictional town and university so that not only the history but also the geography is alternative. I would like to read a sequel set in that timeline but that is not going to happen. It has just occurred to me to wonder whether the political crisis in That Hideous Strength is the sort of thing that Lewis might have expected from a post-war Labour government.
The attempted scientific control of society is also relevant to Anderson's Psychotechnic History.
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