Talk:Future history

message: --207.235.162.254 14:21, 11 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Comments 

message: Visio fishbone diagram adapts insights from this Eco-Futures Forum visual learning reference:   ( Don't Know Much about Planet Earth )RJBurkhart 01:31, 29 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Re*Visioning  [[Tom Clancy]]'s [[USNA#Notable_Graduates|USNA Alumni]] Inspiration 

message: Many people might be surprised to learn that Robert A. Heinlein (USNA Class of 1929), possibly the most influential science-fiction writer ever, was a Naval Academy alumnus. 
So too was William Lederer (USNA Class of 1936), co-author of The Ugly American. Trident (April 26, 1996) RJBurkhart 11:30, 27 January 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: [[Futures studies]] connections

message: Most of the Heinlein stories I have read usually include some mention of events or other factors that are clearly not present in the real history that was current at the time of writing (such as airships instead of airplanes in Job) this makes them actual parallel universes rather than "de facto".
Additional comment on this. Later stories (especially To Sail Beyond the Sunset) explicitly mention that there are multiple time lines (alternate histories) but that the primary characters in his earlier stories were from one which is not the one we live in. As I recall the time adjusting orgainization in that story generally used the name of the first person to step on the moon, and the related date, as their tag for the alternate time lines. So, while they were originally future history stories, they later, retroactively, became explicit alternate time line stories.  Wjl2 (talk) 22:02, 2 December 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Heinlein not so "de facto" 

message: There were a number of books with variants on "The Third World War" (mostly involving "the West" against the then Soviet Union, and often giving the latter an advantage) - some mention should be made of them, individually or collectively. Jackiespeel (talk) 17:07, 28 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Third World War and future history

message: I noticed The Uglies Series on the list, and having read those books, they mostly take place at a single period in future history with just a sketch of the history leading up to that point, no detailed chronology of future events or anything like that. By that standard, virtually any sci-fi story taking place in the future which gives some brief account of events between now and then would qualify as a "future history", which seems much too broad. I suspect the same may be true of a lot of the other examples listed in the article. Can we specify that "future history", if not actually providing a detailed chronology, should at least devote significant chunks of the story to multiple future time periods? And maybe people familiar with the stories listed could remove the ones that don't fit this template? Hypnosifl (talk) 18:20, 18 August 2010 (UTC)
thread_title: Do all the examples really belong?

message: Assertions of 'first to ...' can be risky. The article offers one cite for the assertion that "Neil R. Jones is generally credited as the first author to create a future history". It depends on how this vague term is defined. I'll just point out the 1889 novel The Last American by John Ames Mitchell as a possible counter-example and leave the question for someone intimately familiar with the topic to resolve. Twang (talk) 18:30, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: After London, a few years earlier, might be another counter-example. Barnabypage (talk) 19:20, 1 January 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: As defined on the page, a future history is a timeline of events created by an author, on which more than one novel or story is based. It's not just a book that happens to talk about the future. What other book or story shares the future history timeline used in The Last American and can you point to a reference to the explicit future historical timeline apart from the one book you mentioned? For example, Robert Heinlein's future history timeline exists as a separate document that he used as a reference when writing his books, that's really what we're talking about here - not just science fiction books set in the future. Steevithak (talk) 21:47, 6 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  The first future history is ...?