Important People

Structurally, a future history has an earlier period and a later period and the earlier period has a pivotal character or characters who are builders of the future:

in HG Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come, Gustave de Windt, author of Social Nucleation (1942);

in Robert Heinlein's Future History, DD Harriman, "The Man Who Sold The Moon";

in Isaac Asimov's future history, Susan Calvin, robopsychologist;

in James Blish's Cities in Flight, Senator Bliss Wagoner, secretly behind the spindizzy and the antiagathics;

in Blish's The Seedling Stars, Jacob Rullman, inventor of pantropy, the science of human adaptation to extraterrestrial environments;

in Blish's Haertel Scholium, Adolph Haertel and also Thor Wald, inventor of the Dirac transmitter;

in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, Valti and Fourre;

in Anderson's Technic History, Nicholas van Rijn, leader of the independents in the Polesotechnic League, and David Falkayn, discoverer of Mirkheim and Founder of Avalon;

in Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history, John Christian Falkenberg, mercenary.

Wells' Philip Raven dreams an "Outline of the Future" whereas Asimov's Hari "Raven" Seldon predicts the future. Raven's dreamed text includes a chapter on Karl Marx and Henry George.

Database

In Poul Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire, chapters entitled "The Mother of the Moon" are flashbacks to the long life of Dagny Beynac followed by the short career of her download. In Anderson's Harvest Of Stars, chapters entitled "Database" are about the second download Guthrie, the one that went to Alpha Centauri and returned. The first of these "Database" chapters is set in the narrative present of the novel whereas the second is a flashback to his time on the Centaurian planet, Demeter, and includes a memory from the time before he left the Solar System.

Guthrie was born in 1970. He must have founded Fireball, been downloaded and died in the twenty first century. Dagny must have lived into the twenty second century. Harvest Of Stars is set two centuries after the founding of Fireball and The Stars Are Also Fire another two centuries after that (I think). So far, 1970 is the only definite date mentioned.

Wells' Philip Raven, Heinlein's Lazarus Long, Asimov's Susan Calvin, Blish's Adolph Haertel and Niven's Lucas Garner were born in the twentieth century. The future always starts now.

Narrators And Historians

My copy of Clifford Simak's City ordered via eBay has yet to arrive by post although I have meanwhile reread the relevant story, "Desertion," on line. However, City bears another point of interest to which I will return. 

Who writes a future history series? - I mean apart from the author named on the cover. Do we imagine an historian or narrator living in a further future some time after the events recounted in the concluding instalment of the series? - someone who would be more specific than the omniscient narrator (ON) that:

is invisibly present in every third person narrative;

exists at no time or place;

expresses no opinions;

draws no attention to ON-self (there is no appropriate pronoun);

objectively recounts events, including experiences and thoughts of a viewpoint character;

is not to be identified with any character, not even with a hypothetical future historian whose name and other details remain unknown.

Such a historian would have a name, personal characteristics and opinions even if we never found out what they were whereas ON is an omnipresent, completely transparent, fictional device usually unnoticed because the reader's attention is entirely focused on what ON recounts.

So, apart from ON, is there a historical, spatiotemporally specific, narrator of a future history? Sometimes. yes. Sometimes, not. Sandra Miesel provides such a historian for Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History. Hloch of Stormgate Choth compiles and edits The Earth Book Of Stormgate but not the rest of Anderson's Technic History. But there are other historians in that series.

Philip Raven dreams Wells' The Shape Of Things To Come. One of the Last Men telepathically communicates Last And First Men to Olaf Stapledon although Stapledon thinks that he is writing speculative fiction.

The stories in City have individual introductions that bind them together and are written as from a later perspective which it will be interesting to reread so that is all for now, folks.