The Future

"If, somehow, a writer knew the future, s/he could not write a story set in it. There would be too much strangeness, too much explaining to do. (Think of yourself going back just a hundred years in time and trying to tell people what it was like up ahead.)"

-Poul Anderson, All One Universe (New York, May 1997), p. 250.

I have imagined a novel written and set in 3000 AD, temporally transported to 2000 AD, translated and published without explanation. It would refer to then recent events without explaining them just as we can refer, e.g, to World War II, or just "the War," without having to explain that. Such a novel would be incomprehensible, disregarded and long forgotten by 3000 AD.

Sf can be not only set in our future but also show characters dealing with their futures, eg, HG Wells' Time Traveller and Anderson's Martin Saunders in "Flight to Forever." One of Anderson's Time Patrolmen reflects:

"It was a peculiar feeling to read the headlines and know, more or less, what was coming next. It took the edge off, but added a sadness, for this was a tragic era."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.

While reading headlines in 1955, he would know something of our situation in 2026.

Characters in James Blish's The Quincunx Of Time receive increasingly incomprehensible messages from successive periods of their future.

Fictional series can hint at future events long before divulging them. Near the beginning of The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I, a fictional introduction refers to a recent (to the author) "Terran War" which does not occur until the end of Volume III. 

Through seven volumes, Julian May refers to a Metapsychic Rebellion which finally occurs in a concluding volume.

We cannot know the future but can imagine and fictionalize about it.