Past And Future History

Any future history is the second part of a complete history of which the first part is past. Sometimes we are shown the complete history. HG Wells wrote The Outline Of History and The Shape Of Things To Come. Olaf Stapledon wrote Last And First Men and Last Men In London. In the latter volume, a future Last Man reviews past history.

The opening story of Robert Heinlein's Future History is set in 1951. Volume I of the Future History covers the second half of the twentieth century. The stories in Volume II are set around 2000. The chronologically earliest dialogue in Volume IV is in a flashback to 1874 (which was past when Heinlein wrote it).

Certain works by Poul Anderson span past, present and future:

The Corridors Of Time

There Will Be Time

The Boat Of A Million Years

Time Patrol

Some problems are common to past and future. In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History:

"...the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment..." (see here)

- prevents resolution of "...innate contradictions..." (ibid.) in an early interstellar civilization.

In Olaf Stapledon's future history, the entire struggle of the First Men from savagery to civilization was, according to one of the Last Men, a mere stirring in the sleep of the human spirit. In this stirring, two ideals were conceived. Socrates delighted in truth, Jesus in persons. Their ideals, respectively, were dispassionate intelligence and passionate worship. Socrates' intellectual integrity and Jesus' integrity of will each involved the other. (Although you wouldn't think it!) However, and this is where Stapledon's text converges with Anderson's:

"Unfortunately both these ideals demanded of the human brain a degree of vitality and coherence of which the nervous system of the First Men was never really capable."

-Olaf Stapledon, Last And First Men IN Stapledon, Last And First Men/Last Men In London (Penguin, 1972), pp. 5-327 AT p. 21.

In other words, the prevailing stage of psychodevelopment was insufficient.