For decades, most
science fiction reference works have credited Robert A. Heinlein with creating
the field’s first "future history." In this sense, a future history
is a fictional projection devised by an author charting what humanity's future
might be like over several centuries or even millennia and against which many of
that author’s stories are set. Familiar examples include Asimov's Foundation
stories, Dickson's Dorsai series, and Brin's Uplift saga.
Typically
scholars have pointed to the March 1941 issue of Astounding, where to
much fanfare by the awe-struck editor,
Heinlein presented his now-famous chart of one possible future course for
humankind, indicating broad social trends, key inventions, and just where in
the chronology various of his stories fit. Encompassing the colonization of
other planets, a fundamentalist dictatorship in the U.S., interplanetary conflict,
vastly extended lifespan, and eventual star travel (and pointing toward an increasing
maturity in the human race as a whole), it was impressive then, and remains
impressive now.
What most SF
historians seem to have overlooked is another important sf writer, Edmond
Hamilton (1904-1977), whose future history was first drawn up in the late
1920s, at least a decade before Heinlein's, and within which he had already
written some two dozen novels and stories before Heinlein made his first
appearance in a mag. Oddly, not only was Hamilton's future history created
first, but it was published publicly first – a year
earlier than Heinlein's in
May 1940 – an event which appears to have gone unnoticed by genre historians.
It may be that Heinlein's future history attracted more notice since it had
appeared in the most successful and respected of sf magazines, the august Astounding Science Fiction (today
renamed Analog Science Fact and Fiction),
whereas Hamilton's description of his future history appeared in the less
reputable pages of the lurid sf pulp, Thrilling
Wonder Stories.
Hamilton called
it "my 'History of the Solar System,'" although it followed
humankind's destiny much further than that, much further, in fact, than
Heinlein's. According to Hamilton, this history was the "most ambitious piece of writing
I have ever undertaken is one that will never be published. It Is my 'History of the Solar system,' a nonfiction work to which I have been
slowly adding for some time.
"I began it as a
simple chronology. It seemed to me that
it was hard to write about the future if
you did not have a fairly definite idea of your own of what the future was going to be like. A writer, I
thought, ought to have some coherent framework on which to hang his tales of
future events—then they would be apt to be more logical in each story.
"I set up a
simple chronology of the main evens in the Solar System as I foresaw them. Please understand I make no claim to be a
prophet. Nobody can really write the history of the future until it
happens. But this is my own particular
guess as to the way it may happen.
"I've tried to
stick to this framework in my stories since then. It covers only the main tides of future
history, the greater crises and changes.
There is plenty of room In it for an unlimited number of new stories, I
believe." Ultimately this future history
was to encompass the vast majority of Hamilton’s
stories, from the early tales like Crashing Suns, Outside the Universe and
Locked Worlds of the mid-to-late 1920s through his later, critically-acclaimed,
mature works of the 1960s such as The Star of Life, The Haunted Stars and Star
Hammer.
It even encompassed
the Captain Future stories, knitting all his work into a disparate whole.
Various portions of this future were published in letters-to-the-editor and
story-behind-the-story columns, as well as in footnotes to some novels.
Below from the
May 1940 Thrilling Wonder Stories “The Story Behind the Story” column is the
piece where Hamilton first laid out a major chunk of his chronology and
provided a bit of background on how and why he evolved his future history.
Preceding it are the original editorial headline and introducing Hamilton’s somewhat
informal essay.
"TOMORROW’S
HISTORY
“'One of these days we expect to have Edmond Hamilton drop into our
office, a voluminous Manuscript entitled "History of the Solar
System," written on indestructible parchment, tucked under his arm. Until that time, however, we'll have to be
content to let Author Hamilton disburse the doings of the worlds centuries
hence in piece-meal form, in his various fictional offerings, and in this department.
For Edmond Hamilton, as we have noted on a previous occasion, is the future's
Number I historian. He has compiled the
geographies, the habitats, the colonization’s, the conquests and the wars of
all the nine planets with encyclopedia-like thoroughness. And whenever he wants
a plot for a story he merely thumbs through his fifty cubic feet of reference
notes, finds a likely subject, and taps out a corking yarn.’
This is Edmond
Hamilton’s original 1940 description of his history of tomorrow:
“The most
ambitious piece of writing I have ever undertaken is one that will never be
published. It Is my "History of the Solar system," a nonfiction work to
which I have been slowly adding for some time.
I began it as a
simple chronology. It seemed to me that
it was hard to write about the future if
you did not have a fairly definite idea of your own of what the future was going to be like. A writer, I
thought, ought to have some coherent framework on which to hang his tales of
future events—then they would be apt to be more logical in each story.
I set up a
simple chronology of the main evens in the Solar System as I foresaw them. Please understand I make no claim to be a
prophet. Nobody can really write the history of the future until it
happens. But this is my own particular
guess as to the way it may happen.
I've tried to
stick to this framework in my stories since then. It covers only the main tides of future
history, the greater crises and changes.
There is plenty of room In it for an unlimited number of new stories, I
believe. Now and then one of my older
stories, written before I started adhering to the History, bobs up in a
magazine. But in the main, as readers of
THRILLING WONDER STORIES and its companion magazines will recognize, I have
adhered to my chronology.
It may be
interesting to give an idea of the scheme -of my History, by quoting here the
titles of the first few sections of it.
"EXPLORATION
AND COLONIZATION, 1971-2011."
This deals with the first pioneering flights in space, from that of Johnson to
the moon in 1911, up to the successful colonization of Icy Pluto. This was, of course, an era of rapidly
expanding Earth Influence.
"THE
FRONTIER ERA, 2011-2247" is the section devoted to the wild two hundred
years in which the System Government, with headquarters on Earth, struggled to
bring the half-explored nine worlds, with their colonists and native planetary
peoples, under complete law and order, against the opposition of space-pirates,
plotters and scientific criminals who In some cases actually threatened to
overthrow the Government itself.
"ERA OF
INTERPLANETARY SECESSION, 2247-2621." takes up the fateful four centuries
in which the various colonized planets began to drift toward a desire for
independence from the System Government.
It describes the Martian Rebellion of 2463, the Swampmen Uprising on Venus. and the
other bids for independence that the
System Government struggled to put down. It ends with the date, August 17, 2621, when President
Alderdice of the System government signed the fateful Recognition of
Independence which recognized planets as
free, self-governing worlds.
“I need not go
on with the History here, since the above will give an idea of its scheme. But, whenever I have had a little
spare time I have added to this mass of material, sometimes drawing maps of the
swamps and lands of Venus, or the mountain ranges of Uranus, sometimes writing
a detailed little account of some event that particularly interested me. In
fact, though I started the History simply for convenience, I soon found it a
fascinating thing to work on."
(Hamilton ended the outline he provided Thrilling Wonder Stories here. But this only encompassed the early years of the settling of the solar system. We will feature an expanded version of this history that Hamilton wrote later, detailing the remaining years of the two thousand centuries his history of the future encompassed in a forthcoming blog.)
The climax of this twenty thousand year history is Hamilton's novel, The Star Kings, available from Futures-Past Editions in Kindle at Amazon for only $3.75.
Bott's Filled with denigrating phrases unrelated to the content of the book itself that seemed calculated to injure the most impervious ego. Among them,
"neither a writer nor a story-teller", "heavy-handed and ponderous",
"elephantine prose", "endless philosophizing, (on a juvenile level)",
"obscure sociological
fantasies", "the soap
opera of science fiction" and the clincher "it's not a good book!" Among
other things, Bott seemed to have overlooked the fact that the
Foundation series had been wildly popular with fans when it appeared in magazine form and readers were clamoring to see it in hardcover.
"Doubleday ordinarily
produces much of the best science fiction printed today. Your reviewer has tried
to be objective in analyzing this novel, but . . .
publisher would have anticipated a negative response from
Asimov and fandom in general. And there was one. But perhaps that was exactly what
publisher William Hamling and reviewer Bott wanted. For such a
controversy was bound to bring readers to their pages and, in a Ray
Palmer like move (and Hamling was a Palmer protege), increase the magazine's
circulation.
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