Routine Space Travel

We have said this before. A contemporary novel routinely referring to mobile phones, laptops, the Internet and communications satellites would have been sf if it had been published in the mid-twentieth-century but, back then, we expected that the early twenty-first century would be all about routine space travel. Patrick Moore, interviewed by a younger man on British TV, seriously asked the interviewer to send him a post card from the Moon when visiting it as a tourist about ten years from then. Think about all the wrong assumptions implied by that request. In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the stories in Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, showing Luna City, indentured servitude on Venus and the colonization of Mars as well as both Martians and Venerians, are set about 2000. 

In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series, Manse Everard, recruited by the Patrol in 1954, is told about the future but we the readers learn nothing about it until it happens and not much then either. Gorbachev shows up on schedule in The Shield Of Time, published in 1990. A typical room in the Patrol Academy in the Oligocene has the sort of gadgets:

"...you would have expected by, say, A.D. 2000: unobtrusive furniture readily adjusted to a perfect fit, refresher cabinets, screens which could draw on a huge library of recorded sight and sound for entertainment. Nothing too advanced, as yet."

-"Time Patrol," 2, p. 8.

That adjustable furniture occurs in many Andersonian futures but first appeared in The Time Machine.

This post was occasioned by rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, Volume III, and was not expected to encompass the Future History, The Shield Of Time, "Time Patrol" or The Time Machine.