Future Historical Writing

I think that the category of future historical writing encompasses more than just the single volumes or series that we recognize as "future histories." James Blish's Nietzschean short story, "A Dusk of Idols," refers back to major events in the same author's juvenile novel, The Star Dwellers. Thus, these two starkly contrasting works have a linear chronological relationship with each other although not with any of the other stories or novels in this author's multi-branched "Haertel Scholium." This is future historical writing although without a linear history - although Blish did create two such histories in his Okie and pantropy series.

In Poul Anderson's World Without Stars, Hugh Valland is three thousand years old, thanks to the antithanatic. He is possibly the oldest human being in his timeline like Lazarus Long in Heinlein's Future History and Hanno in Anderson's own The Boat Of A Million Years. Valland was young when the antithanatic was developed. The dates on his girlfriend's grave are 2018-2037. Thus, this novel represents a history stretching from our lifetimes to three millennia hence. It is a piece of future history although not a volume of a future history series.

Anderson's After Doomsday begins in a near future soon after the advent of extra-solar aliens and recounts history-changing events on an interstellar scale, including a space battle celebrated in a ballad that will continue to be sung in bars and inns on different planets into an indefinite future. This is clearly future historical material although the novel does not cover a long enough period for this text itself to be classified as a "future history."