The Short Future Histories

The previous post postulated a conceptual sequence comprising one future history each by Heinlein and Niven and four by Anderson. Anderson succeeds Heinlein but also surpasses him both in the number of his future histories and in their length and scope.

For completeness, we should also mention four shorter and more specialized future history series by Anderson, covering respectively:

post-nuclear Earth;
asteroid colonization;
extrasolar colonization;
interstellar trade;
interstellar exploration.

The Kith history exists in two forms, the first emphasizing trade, the second emphasizing exploration. As always when formulating such lists, I learn more in the process.

Meanwhile, we have been assured that SM Stirling's Under The Yoke should still be in the post, Volume II not of a future history about men versus technology but of an alternative history about men versus men.

Very Short Future Histories

Literary Stages

(i) Two very short unrelated "future histories," Maurai (three stories) and Kith (two stories), short enough to fit into a single collection.

(ii) The Maurai history acquires a long novel, Orion Shall Rise, and is incorporated into the time travel novel, There Will Be Time.

(iii) Kith acquires one new story, "The Tale of the Cat," which would fit between the existing stories, "Ghetto" and "The Horn of Time the Hunter."

(iv) A future historical novel, Starfarers, incorporates "Ghetto" and "The Tale of the Cat" though not "The Horn of Time the Hunter."

Observations
The Maurai are one period in a time travel history as the Kith are one period in the Starfarers history.
As a tidying up and gathering together exercise, the Maurai and Kith collection should become just a Maurai collection and "The Horn of Time the Hunter" should be included as an appendix in Starfarers.
There would then be four volumes where there were previously just five short stories.
"Ghetto" is a harrowing story of class conflict destroying a personal relationship and I am not sure that I want to reread it.
However, I will reread "The Tale of the Cat" and maybe some other chapters of Starfarers for discussion on this blog.

Post-Maurai Space Travel?

After the Maurai, will there be space travel? (The space travelling Kith who share the title of Poul Anderson's collection Maurai And Kith exist in an alternative future.) Yes, Orion shall rise and yes, there will be Star Masters, although these predictions seem to apply to alternative post-Maurai futures. In one sequel to the Maurai series and in an Author's Note to a second, Anderson adequately accounts for any inconsistencies with the original series.

Several Anderson characters, including some in the Maurai series, express a wish not only to traverse space but even to travel to the stars. Why? Decades ago, I felt embarrassed when an American teacher (a Trekkie?) addressing a World Science Fiction Convention, tried to express optimism about the human condition by proclaiming, "We're going to the stars!" Are we? Not yet. But why should we and what would we do on arrival?

Earth is the only place in the universe where we do not need to be protected from everything outside our own skins. Even here, in most climates, we need clothing, shelter and heating. Of course, we have spread across the globe, changing local environments to suit our needs and also adapting ourselves, even changing skin colour in the Northern Hemisphere. This process will continue and need not be confined to Earth.

On the other hand, a planet on which humanity has not evolved, ie, any planet other than Earth, will not be a new North America or Australia and its inhabitants, if any, are unlikely to be either remotely humanoid or humanly comprehensible. I agree that there are compelling reasons to get some human beings off Earth and out into the Solar System in self-sustaining habitats but that means taking our environment with us, not traversing interstellar distances hoping to find that environment duplicated elsewhere.

We can observe and study the universe from any point within it, from here as well as from there. I agree that we will learn more if we can travel further and that this should be done if possible. What Anderson's characters really mean about going to the stars is that we should accept no physical or mental limits to our activities and I agree with this completely.

Maurai In There Will Be Time

 I think that the best reading order for Poul Anderson's Maurai series is:

(i) the three short stories which are collected in Maurai And Kith but should now be a single volume, just Maurai;

(ii) the long (486 pages) novel, Orion Shall Rise;

(iii) the much shorter time travel novel, There Will Be Time.

In each volume, in fact in each individual work, the perspective broadens, first geopolitically, the historically. The Maurai rule in the Southern Hemisphere. Then we learn progressively more about the Northern Hemisphere: the Northwest Union; Uropa. Finally, the entire Maurai period is placed in a longer historical context. Jack Havig, born 1933, visits, among other eras, Constantinople in 1204, the Maurai Federation and the further future of the Star Masters.

I was surprised to realize that, despite my preferred reading order, Orion is copyright 1983 whereas Time is 1973. Thus, only the first three stories informed Time. (Addendum: Only the first two. See combox.) In fact, Orion acquired the surname of a character, Terai Lohannaso, and that of a country, the Northwest Union, from Time. The Domain of Skyholm did not exist until Orion.

Time both informs us that Poul Anderson invented the name "Maurai" for a future civilization visited by Havig and continues to use that fictional name so there is a real history that we are not being told. In one of the three stories, Poul predicted something that Havig discovered later but he "...guessed wrong more often than right." p. 129.

Havig comments:

"If anybody who knows the future should chance to read this, it'll look at most like one of science fiction's occasional close-to-target hits...Which are made on the shotgun principle...These stories never had wide circulation. They soon dropped into complete obscurity." (p.129)

Let us hope not.

There Will Be Time

What have Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise and There Will Be Time got in common? Each has a title that is a full sentence in the future tense (one refers to space; the other to time) and the Foreword to There Will Be Time refers to the Maurai, one of the future nationalities in Orion Shall Rise.

In this very strange Foreword, the author, Poul Anderson, directly addresses the reader. He convincingly describes a relative, Dr Robert Anderson, who, we come to realise, must be fictitious. This fictitious Anderson (fictitiously) inspired both the Maurai series and the present novel. Could this fictitious inspiration, Robert Anderson, partly represent a real inspiration, Robert Anson Heinlein? (I don't know.)

Robert addresses the narrator of the Foreword as "Poul" and refers to "Karen" so we are in no doubt that, in this case, narrator and author are identical, but, for the rest of the novel, Robert is the narrator though not the central character. He mediates between Poul and Jack Havig, a time traveller. In fact, there are perhaps five layers here:

you and me reading the novel;
Poul Anderson, the author of the novel;
Poul Anderson, the narrator of the Foreword;
Robert Anderson, the narrator of the rest of the novel;
Jack Havig, the central character of the novel.

Poul Anderson the narrator is a strong link between reality and fiction.

There Will be Time is a very good time travel novel of which there are few. I used to think that Poul Anderson's two volume Time Patrol series, considered as a unit, and Jack Finney's two Time novels, also considered as a unit, were the two culminations of the time travel fiction that had been initiated by The Time Machine and wondered if there could be a third. Later, I accepted that Audrey Niffeneger's The Time Traveler's Wife was a third. However, a few other novels, like The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers and this one by Anderson, are certainly comparable.

Orion Rises

 When I wrote that Orion Shall Rise by Poul Anderson (London, 1988) was "Rooted In The Past," I had not yet reread to pages 306-308 where a hundred women - maidens, wives and grandmothers - meet at standing stones to curse a usurper who:

"...claimed his world-view embraced eons, but...had no real conception of ancientness. He could not admit that a people may have a right to preserve their own nature..." (p. 306)

The curse, in the names of Deu, Zhesu-Crett and all saints, is Christian. A distinction is made between saints "...on high..." and "...in the Afterworld..." "...on high..." must refer to the aristocrats in the aerostat who, we have been told, are commonly regarded as "saints."

This curse takes us right back to the earliest European history and even reminds us of the Nine Witch-Queens in Poul and Karen Anderson's historical fantasy tetralogy, The King Of Ys. The town that was Quimper in the Ys period has become Kemper in the Orion period. Orion Shall Rise encapsulates the past of Europe and a future for the world. The old religion Christianity, represented by a Bishop in Devon, clashes with the new philosophy of Gaeanity, represented by the cursed usurper.

We had known from early in the novel that "Orion" was a top secret prohibited technology project in a country defeated by the conservationist Maurai. On page 311 of 468, we are finally told exactly what it is although perhaps I should not state that here? The Maurai go to war to suppress Orion but are resisted by their adversaries' peculiar "Lodge" system. What seemed to be a population fleeing from invaders turns out to have been a population mobilized to use hidden weapons to destroy the Maurai Marine Corps. Any population outnumbers any invading army so that, if the population is motivated, armed and organized, then invaders beware. Anderson knew the importance of different kinds of social organization.

The Pey-d'Or is a tavern introduced early in the novel and a place that becomes familiar as characters meet and return there. They include "the Stormrider" Iern and the balladeer Plik. Anderson endows the latter with a (slightly implausible?) poetic/prophetic ability to mythologize the historical events occurring around him and to predict in general terms how they must go. Although an archaic Nicene Christian, he knows that:

"...the gods are doomed - everybody's gods - and what new ones will come striding through their ashes, we shall not live to understand." (p. 316)

 And:

"The Apollonian Domain and Arthurian Maurai are up against Orphic Gaeanity and the Faustian Northwest...the Norrmen are demons readying to overthrow the gods of sky, sea, and earth - though chthonic gods have always had their own dark side - and the war that is coming will bring an end to the world." (p. 270)

The Norrmen of the Northwest are industrial demons challenging European aerostatic government (sky), the Maurai (sea) and Gaeans (land).

Although in this instance writing sf, Anderson, through Plik, applies the language of mythological fantasy and ensures that the reader does not miss the significance of seemingly small events that will have enormous consequences later in the narrative. By "...an end to the world..." is meant an end to the present world order. A four sided conflict is an improvement on the twosidedness often seen in popular fiction. A Gaean, secretly helped by the Northwest Wolf Lodge, has seized control of the Domain but is provoking civil war.

The Maurai In Orion Shall Rise

In Poul Anderson's Orion Shall Rise, the Maurai Federation comes on-stage in Chapter Two, still powerful enough to enforce on nearby nations its policies of ecological balance and no nuclear power, now engaging in a series of wars (a Whale War, a Power War) with the Northwest Union, to the north of the Mericans, where government is minimal and society is mainly organized around Lodges (Wolf, Fish Hawk, Polaris):

"A local Lodgemaster could field a regiment overnight, and disperse it to anonymity when its mission was completed." (1)

It seems that the Mong are still in North America (maybe that is one of the inconsistencies mentioned in the Author's Note?) and we learn that their ancestors had crossed from "Sberya" over a channel frozen for several months each year because

"...nuclear detonations had filled the upper air with dust." (1)

I think the idea of the nuclear winter is that radioactive dust would fill the entire upper atmosphere causing endless winter and night everywhere on Earth?

Again, Anderson presents a detailed account of how different countries might recover from a limited nuclear exchange and of how they would understandably and plausibly disagree about international policies for centuries afterwards.

"...mostly, those who survived kept going by creating new versions of savagery or barbarism. Few of them have yet climbed any further back. Few, if any, ever will, unless-" (2)

But some have climbed further, in different directions from different starting points, and we are bound to reflect that even savagery and barbarism are preferable to extinction. The world is in nowhere near as bad a state as it might have been. The Maurai impose their policies but are nevertheless benign, not imperialistic. A qualitatively different culture has emerged from the lessons taught by the War of Judgement.

We learn that the Maurai pantheon of Tanaroa the Creator with Lesu Haristi the Saviour on his right and shark-toothed Nan the Destroyer on his left is called the Triad. In the Prologue and Chapter One, we had learned that:

European peasants call the Aerogens "saints" and believe that they are endlessly reborn in Skyholm;

many believed that Deu Himself placed Skyholm in heaven to prevent a new Judgement;

Aerogens believe that the present generation carry their "ancestral anims";

 
the agnostic Iern attends services as a Clansman but shrugs at the blessing "Zhesu ward you";

there is a new philosophy called Gaeanism;

the name of the Aerogens' First Captain, "Great Charles," can be used as an oath.

Thus, almost subliminally, we are taught more than we might realize about European and Maurai religion.

Finally, a Maurai visiting the Northwest Union hears without understanding a defiant slogan cried by a child:

"Orion shall rise!" (3)

1. Anderson, Poul, Orion Shall Rise, London, 1988, p. 38.
2. ibid., p. 34.
3. ibid., p. 41.

Man Versus Nature

Anderson often describes combat but, in Orion Shall Rise, he presents an inspiring variation - or alternative.

Observers in Skyholm, a two kilometer wide stratospheric aerostat above Tours, alert the Weather Corps when they detect, approaching Uropa, a Force Twelve hurricane that will:

"...flatten the Etang area, drown a score of fishing villages, and probably wreck Port Bordeu..." (1)

  - disrupting shipping and killing the two thirds of the inhabitants who cannot be evacuated in time.

Weather Command orders all of its Stormrider jet aircraft to Port Bordeu for a briefing before flying to the hurricane. Three jets enter the storm at different points. Ascending from the middle of the storm to an altitude of ten kilometers, Stormrider Iern probes with radar, infrared sensors, calibrated magnifiers and a Maurai television camera. Having located the eye of the storm, he then maps it by spiraling in loops of three kilometer's radius, two kilometers apart. Enclosed in night, wind, lightning, thunder, rain and sleet, he fights to keep his craft intact and in the air. Entering the calm at the center, he returns to the fight while instruments gauge and an ultrahigh-frequency beam transmits pressures, velocities, ionizations, potentials and gradients to the Domain's single, powerful computer at Skyholm.

Finished transmitting and now close to hill-high waves, he returns to the center and climbs. At Skyholm, solar collectors continually refill accumulators powering lasers focused on well-chosen parts of the storm, either drilling and eroding or upsetting the balance. The core, still active but reduced in force, veers northwest, causing strong winds and heavy rains along the coast for two or three days but nothing disastrous. Further energy input might drive the core against Eria (Ireland) so Skyholm desists.

Combat skills and techniques, a fighter jet but without weapons and no human beings killing each other. Why can't it always be like that? Earth also needs an asteroid defense system. Ierne reflects that:

"A storm so great that men fought against it came but twice or thrice in a career." (2)

But there must be other kinds of hazards and disasters that they can fight?

He might also see human combat. There have been conflicts in Espaynia, Italya and Iberya. However:

"Iern hoped the peace would endure. He didn't relish the idea of killing men. He didn't even hunt -" (3)

Iern is a good contrast to warrior heroes. His battle against the storm is a hopeful precursor of a peaceful future when jet aircraft no longer fight each other.

(1) Anderson, Poul, Orion Shall Rise, London, 1988, p. 14.
(2) ibid., p. 16.
(3) ibid., p. 15.

From Maurai To Skyholm

If not for the early Author's Note mentioning the Maurai, the reader would not immediately know that Orion Shall Rise connects with that series. The 468 page text begins on page 1. The Maurai are first mentioned on page 7 and then only in a list of five or more other nations with which "the Domain" must deal. On page 13, we learn that, although our hero still uses a large, crude, vacuum tubed radio set powered by his castle's coal-fired generator, transistorised portable radios can be bought from the, obviously more advanced, Maurai Federation.

Thus, this novel is set in a later period when more nations have become prominent. Also, its narrative net has been cast more widely so that we initially view the Maurai from a foreign perspective.

The Domain, covering much of Europe, is controlled by aristocratic families, the Thirty Clans of the Aerogens, from a stratospheric aerostat called "Skyholm" or "Ileduciel." The Domain includes households like that of Mael the Red whose farm is worked by himself, his family, his tenants and their families. The account of how Mael's household receives an Aerogen visitor with a feast would fit into one of Anderson's historical novels.

The Aerogen and his host's daughter have a son who is brought up in Mael's household until his father takes him away to be his heir. Thus, Chapter One, starting on page 10 (so far we have read only a Prologue), begins with the son, Iern, now grown, taking his place in the world.

We realize both that the Domain is a powerful realm with which the Maurai will have to deal and that winds of change blow yet again. As Iern grew up, many centuries in our future but nevertheless surrounded by medieval city walls, Stone Age tombs, menhirs, cromlechs, dolmens and passage graves:

"...he got into him a sense of time as an endless storm-wind, on which men and nations and gods were blown like autumn leaves, forever." (1)

(1) Anderson, Poul, Orion Shall Rise, London, 1988, p. 8.

More About The Maurai II

The original Maurai series is just three stories set centuries apart, thus with no characters in common. The third story, "Windmill," unlike the others, has a first person narrator. The story is his letter to a character whom we do not see and begins mid-sentence. Again, it shows a Maurai abroad so the concluding passage of the second story, "Progress," remains our only sight in this series of their home civilization.

"Windmill" confirms that the Merican god Oktai had been imported by Mong invaders who have since been expelled. The dark ages are past and more people now place their trust in science.

The Maurai enforce ecological conservation at the expense of the kind of rapid industrial and technological progress that had squandered resources, causing overpopulation and nuclear war. Thus, Anderson comments on his period while addressing major issues and showing his characters disagreeing about them.

Windmills as such are of course acceptable. However, the windmills of the title are being used to pump dry a water table that is "...vital to an entire ecology..." so they must be stopped just as an atomic power station was destroyed in "Progress." (1)

Anderson also shows us the society changing. First, the narrator proposes, in "...a radical break with tradition...," that the Maurai help those whom they have dispossessed to reclaim stony ocean islands with topsoil, seeds, rainwater cisterns, solar stills, palm and breadfruit culture and sea ranching. (1) Secondly, the leader of the dispossessed community ends the story by reminding the Maurai that they will not be powerful forever...

That conclusion could have led into a sequel. However, the next Maurai-related work is not another short story but a long novel, Orion Shall Rise, which begins with an Author's Note explaining that this new work is not fully consistent with the earlier stories, although the novel does derive its title from "Windmill":

"...risings of Orion and the Cross unseen!" (2)

(1) Anderson, Poul, "Windmill" IN Anderson, P, Maurai And Kith, New York, 1982, pp. 139-168 AT p. 167.
(2) ibid., p. 165.

More About The Maurai

More on Religion, Psychodynamics and Civilisation

Religion

In the second Maurai story, "Progress," Lesu Haristi is addressed as "...Son of Tanaroa..." (1) Thus, the Maurai pantheon has aspects of both the Hindu Trimurti and the Christian Trinity.

Trimurti: Creator, Preserver, Destroyer.
Trinity: Father, Son, Spirit.
Maurai pantheon: Creator, Son, Destroyer.

Centuries after the events of the first Maurai story, a Merican still swears by Oktai. A newly introduced nationality, the Beneghalis, swear by Vishnu, the Hindu Preserver.

Psychodynamics

Psychodynamics is an academic discipline applicable to analysis of the "...ethnopolitical situation..." (2) Maurai "...peace enforcers..." are psychodynamic teams (somehow) redirecting the energies of any barbarians who threaten their neighbors. (3) (Neat trick. "Peace enforcement" sounds rather contradictory.)

Anderson cleverly makes us think that psychodynamicists have developed telepathy but, if we read on, we find that the "head-to-head" used by Maurai agents is based on a different means of communication.

Civilisation

Until the concluding section of this second story, we have seen Maurai only away from home. Now at last we see one of their cities. After a pedicab ride into the hills, a foreigner visits a quiet, sunny, book-lined house above groves and gardens sloping down to a mast-filled harbor.

The Maurai, acting covertly, destroy a newly constructed Beneghali atomic power station in order to preserve gradual progress with cultural diversity. A growing industrialism would have spread everywhere very quickly and would have returned the globe to the precarious state that it was in before the War of Judgement whereas psychodynamic science implies that the diverse cultures which originated in isolation during the dark ages after the War will interact creatively if they are allowed to continue their separate developments:

the Maurai exploit the sea and limit their population;
Mericans develop dry farming and continental trade;
Okkaidans adopt moderation as a way of life;
Sberyaks systematize reindeer ranching;
Beneghalis return to the old ways of machine techniques
etc.

In a few short passages, Anderson sketches a world that is rich in diversity and ingenuity if not yet in material possessions. In the first story, three very different cultures had interacted. In the second, there are more.

(1) Anderson, Poul, "Progress" IN Anderson, P, Maurai And Kith, New York, 1982, pp. 73-137 AT p. 113.
(2) ibid., p. 75.
(3) ibid., p. 92.

A Science Of Society?

The premise of both Isaac Asimov's Foundation series and Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic future history is that a group of experts can apply a science of society to society, thus ensuring that a government, or a clandestine group monopolising the science, would be able to achieve its aims (an Empire can be rebuilt on schedule; discontent can be managed so as to prevent social breakdown) as readily as an engineer can build a bridge. The same idea occurs in works by Heinlein and in other works by Anderson.

Anderson's Maurai Federation has made some moves in this direction. Their paramathematical psychology is at an early stage but "...helps control population..." (1)

Ruori of the Maurai sees evidence that his current enemies sometimes fight each other and reflects that:

"The Federation's political psychologists were skilled at the divide-and-rule game." (2) 

Ruori, understanding social processes, sees that the settled Meycan civilisation can conquer the "Sky People" raiders not with an army but with priests (Christian missionaries), merchants, culture and learning. He advocates this because he wants to preserve the Sky People's scientific approach which the Meycans, for all their rote learning from ancient texts, lack.

How plausible is the idea of an applicable science of society as practised by Asimov's "psychohistorians" and Anderson's "psychotechnicians" and approached by Anderson's Maurai? The premise of the Maurai series is that the industrial technological civilisation of the Northern Hemisphere had destroyed itself in a nuclear war so that the Islanders in the Southern Hemisphere, lacking metal to cannibalise, have had to survive by applying scientific method not to oil, iron or uranium but to wind, sun and life. This could include their paramathematical and political psychology.

However, society is us, not an external substance or process that we can observe from outside and perform experiments on. Maybe we, by cooperation and education, can together acquire a better understanding and control of our own activities? The idea of the applicable science of society as presented in these works of sf seems to be the idea of a minority manipulating the majority. And, since society is divided into conflicting interest groups, this controlling minority is likely to serve either its own interests or the interests of whichever other group pays its salaries and funds its activities. Anderson's Psychotechnic History does show the Psychotechnic Institute being overthrown and society preferring to live without that kind of minority control.

(1) Anderson, Poul, "The Sky People" IN Maurai And Kith, New York, 1982, pp. 9-71 AT p. 22.
(2) ibid., p. 34.

Maurai Religion: First Impressions

The Sky People are pagan. Seeing a cathedral, they call it a "temple." One of their leaders invokes "Oktai the Stormbringer" and remembers, as a child, "...opening presents on Midwinter Morning..." (1) Death in war gives a chance to be reborn as a Sky Man but their enemies deserve to be reborn as swine.

The Maurai are pagan. One refers to "Shark-toothed Nan" and another to "...ancestors..." (2) The latter, Ruori, also thinks of a "Bispo" (Bishop) as a high priest, is unsure how to address him and does not understand the word "immodest." But Ruori is educated enough to recognize that the deity "Esu Carito" of whom the Bispo is a high priest is "...cognate with the Maurai Lesu Haristi." (3)

The Meycan city visited by the Maurai and attacked by the Sky People is Christian. It has a cathedral with a statue of "S'Ose" (?) and a bishop who refers to "...el Dio's punishment...". (3) A young woman crosses herself when the Bispo refers to "...judgment..." (3)

The unmarried young women of the city are chaperoned whereas the Maurai have brought "wahines" and Ruori would like to make love to his host's daughter on first acquaintance.

There will be more but this is considerable information to gain from the opening pages.

Addendum, 2/7/12: Near the end of this first story, Ruori invokes "...great creating Tanaroa...," the remaining member of the Maurai trinity. (4)

(1) Anderson, Poul, "The Sky People" IN Anderson, P, Maurai And Kith, New York, 1982, pp. 9-71 AT p. 12.
(2) ibid., p. 14.
(3) ibid., p. 16.
(4) ibid., p. 69.

Series Within Series

In the 1960's, I read "The Game Of Glory," about Dominic Flandry, and "The Sky People," about the Maurai, in different issues of a British reprint version of Venture Science Fiction magazine. Little did I suspect that "The Game Of Glory" was part of a Flandry series that was part of the History of Technic Civilization that was one of several (I suggest there are eight) Anderson future histories, also including the Maurai series.

Later works placed the Maurai in an even wider context. First, an Author's Note at the beginning of the Maurai novel, Orion Shall Rise, explains inconsistencies with earlier Maurai stories by pointing out that new data and insights change our ideas about the past and present so why not also the future? Secondly, the time travel novel, There Will Be Time, changed the status of the Maurai series from that of fiction to that of a fiction within the fiction. A time traveler told an Anderson about the Maurai and Poul wrote a fictional account.

Robert Heinlein wrote the original Future History and three classic self-contained circular causality stories. An obvious question is: if one author writes both a future history and some time travel stories, can he connect or combine them? Can time travelers travel not only through real history but also through the fictitious history? Unfortunately, Heinlein's answer to this question was Time Enough For Love, which belongs firmly in the period of his long, sad decline as a writer. (One admittedly ingenious passage describes how Lazarus Long sent mail from the early twentieth century to his folks back in the far future. Envelopes inside envelopes were stored in a safe place like a lawyer's office until a specified date when the outer envelope was opened and its contents sent to another hopefully safe place but in such a way that no one handling the mail could suspect that its sender knew something about the future. Each link in the chain was strong enough for this to work. Also neatly handled were changes in historical perspectives. People around Lazarus referred to the then current "War." Later it would be called the Great War, then World War One, then Terran Planetary War, Phase One.)

Anderson did not connect his main future history, the Technic History, to his time travel series, the Time Patrol, but did connect his minor Maurai history to a time travel novel, thus locating the Maurai period within a much longer perspective of past and future history. Again, I argue that Anderson succeeded but also superseded Heinlein.