Monday 18 September 2017

Writing A Future History

An sf author may continue to add new instalments to a future history series throughout his career. Further, the order of writing and publication need not correspond to the chronological order of fictional events although we prefer to read the series in the latter order. Thus, we pass back and forth between earlier and later phases of the author's development as a writer. Thus, further, the series is not written in a uniform or homogeneous style and therefore reads more like a real history. We learn to distinguish between earlier and later fictional events and also between earlier and later accounts of such events.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the later written "The Pirate" is followed by the earlier written The Peregrine and "The Chapter Ends" and these three works complete the History. We read about:

a Stellar Union Coordinator;
that Coordinator joining the interstellar Nomads;
a post-Nomads Galactic civilization.

Important events occur first within a single lifetime, then many thousands of years later. Thus, a future history is constructed. "The Pirate" adds an imaginative non-humanoid alien, the information that the hyperdrive is also called the tachyon mode and this History's equivalent of the hypnoprobe, called electronic brainphasing.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't always read series stories by Poul Anderson according to their internal chronology. Sometimes I will read stores set later or earlier in the timeline--as the mood takes me. For example I recently reread A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS, without first reading the earlier stories in the Technic History.

Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
Of course. Having read the series ideally in the right order, we then reread in any order.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't think I ever actually set out to reread the Technic Civilization stories from beginning to end in terms of their internal chronology. Probably because I've reread them often enough to feel little need of doing so.

Sean