Future Histories

[ShannonA]

When I was in High School I read Robert Heinlein's The Past Through Tomorrow and I immediately fell in love with the idea of a future history, which is to say the slow growth and evolution of a science-fiction universe through a large collection of stories.

Heinlein really did it best. Because so much of The Past Through Tomorrow was short stories he was able to highlight many important points in Earth's future history and thus provide what felt like a real narrative in tiny snapshots. I later read some of his extended universe books, which centered on the hi-jinks of Lazarus Long and was increasingly disappointed. I didn't yet know that his early writings and his later ones were so different.

Nonetheless, those first stories were great.

Ever since I've tried to catch that original genie in a bottle.

Marvel Comics came close with a short-lived graphic album series they produced in 1989-1990 called Open Space, but they cancelled it before too much story could be told.

I've enjoyed Niven's Known Space and Baxter's Xeelee books. They each had a collection of short stories which acted as a spine for the unfolding history, but the novels were spread out over such a vast span of space and time that there was little sense of a history actually unfolding.

Brin's Uplift and Asimov's Foundation were contrariwise so concentrated on certain events that there wasn't much a chance to see the bigger scope.

I guess one of the things I like is the tight chronology of man expanding out into the stars, since that's what Heinlein and Open Space both offered.

So what am I missing, and what future histories have other people loved?

[Elizabeth Brooks]

Peter F. Hamilton released an anthology of short stories set in the past of his Night's Dawn series. There's also a lot of history in the trilogy itself.

It may not strictly be a future history, but the anthology seems to come close.

[Wakboth]

The future history of Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality universe is just brilliant.

Many of Poul Anderson's stories (the Van Rijn/Falkayn ones, and the Flandry ones) are set in the same future history; this, along with Asimov, is where we get the Long Night and the galactic dark age.

Edit: For the sheer scope, no one has to my knowledge beat Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker; his science (and near-future) is mostly obsolete, but his ideas are wonderful.

[ShannonA]

I'd forgotten about the Stapledon books, but I read them several years ago, and they were indeed quite enjoyable for exactly these same reasons.

[Per Andersson]

Probably a bit different than you were thinking of, but Gen. John Hackett's 'The Thirld World War' and 'The Third World War - The Untold Story' was a good piece of near-future history.

A bit dated now, though.

[Piestrio]

If you haven't yet read Heinlein's "For us, The Living", it was the first of the future histories that he wrote but was not published until several years ago.

It's a great read, but only for Heinlein fans. You can really see the seeds of his later future history books and some ideas that never made it into published books. Unfourtunatly like most postmortum wroks it's really rough arounf the edges.

Piestrio

(First post!)

[Piestrio]

Also there's a book out now about the "zombie wars" told like an oral history.

Piestrio

[Fritzef]

I really liked The Past Through Tomorrow--I remember buying it in paperback one summer in the 70s, when I was in high school. Ultimately, I think that Heinlein was better at short stories than novels.

A very different book, though with elements that I think Heinlein would have recognized, that I've enjoyed recently is Theodore Judson's Fitzpatrick's War. In a way, it's the Alexander the Great story turned on its head and set in a very unusual dystopian future. The book is explicitly framed in a historical manner, though--it is supposedly the diary of one of the people involved in great events, now published a couple of centuries later. There are editorial insertions by a stodgy Victorianish editor explaining how the diary can't be correct (though, as readers we of course believe it is).

[The Fiendish Dr. Samsara]

For the sheer scope, no one has to my knowledge beat Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker; his science (and near-future) is mostly obsolete, but his ideas are wonderful.

Although Stapledon is doing something very different from Heinlein's kind of "Future History", I think his works are among the most brilliant I've read. Unlike Heinlein's, they read as if they actually are the history of the future.