Some Fundamentals

Nothing that hasn't been said before but fundamental to this blog:

My two favourite kinds of sf are time travel and future histories. Poul Anderson not only excels at both but also presents multiple examples of both. 

Both of these sf themes address in different ways the mysterious nature of time. HG Wells' Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that that morning he had set off through "tomorrow" and "into futurity." The opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set in 1951 - but it remains the Future History. Its readers' chronological relationship to it does not affect the nature of the series.

There are two kinds of future histories:

single-volume future historical text books, mainly by Wells and Stapledon;

series of stories and novels set in successive historical periods by Heinlein, Anderson and others.

Stapledon recounts Martian invasions of Earth the way English historians recount the Norman Conquest. Anderson's Technic History does what Heinlein's Future History should have done, expands through many volumes: seven omnibus volumes when collected by Baen Books as The Technic Civilization Saga. This blog periodically returns to the Saga. Last night, while listening to a YouTube interview, I posted Important Events which says nothing new but nevertheless drew an interesting comment about the plausibility or otherwise of the founding of the Terran Empire. Several characters are introduced in Saga, Volume I, go through some changes in Volume II and reach their climax at the beginning of Volume III. The sheer length of the Technic History allows time and space for such developments to occur.

Yesterday, we also discussed Two Meanings Of "Time Travel."