Social SF

Blog attention spiraled back to Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History when (here) it became possible to consider that future history alongside two other series by Anderson and one by SM Stirling. Although modeled directly on Robert Heinlein's Future History, the Psychotechnic History is part of a particular sub-genre together with - among certain other authors' works, of course - HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come and The World Set Free. (However, those two Wellsian volumes are independent novels, not short story collections.) 

The common sub-genre comprises those works, sometimes "utopian," addressing the question: how to change society with the help of science? CS Lewis parodies this question in his Ransom Trilogy, Volume III, That Hideous Strength, where his scientific social reformers are literally demonically controlled.

I see this as the central dynamic of twentieth century sf: Wells and Stapledon opposed by Lewis but followed by Heinlein, Anderson, Blish etc with Anderson and Blish addressing theological questions. Lewis wrote The Problem Of Pain and Anderson wrote "The Problem of Pain." Lewis describes the sinless planet, Perelandra (Venus) and Blish describes the sinless planet, Lithia (extra-solar). And so on.

In the Psychotechnic History, the question is: how does the world reconstruct after a limited nuclear exchange?

UN world government, becoming the Solar Union.

A secret service led by the fanatically anti-nationalist Fourre.

Un-men and the cloned Rostomily Brotherhood.

Suppression of conspiracies by nationalists and other turn-back-the-clock merchants.

Centralized agriculture.

Massive single-structure urban residential complexes.

Colonies under the sea and on other planets.

The work of the Psychotechnic Institute both in a predictive science of society (impossible but this sf) and in human psychophysiology.

Everything fails! But there are psychotechnicians in a peaceful Galactic civilization millennia later.