Editing Future history (section)

==Future becoming past==
The future projected in a "future history" can often turn out to be wildly inaccurate.

For example, in 1933 [[H. G. Wells]] postulated in ''[[The Shape of Things to Come]]'' a [[Second World War]] in which [[Nazi Germany]] and [[Poland]] are evenly matched militarily, fighting an indecisive war over ten years; and Poul Anderson's early 1950s [[The Psychotechnic League|Psychotechnic League]] depicted a world undergoing a devastating [[Nuclear warfare|nuclear war]] in 1958, yet by the early 21st century managing not only to rebuild the ruins on Earth but also engage in extensive space colonization of the Moon and several planets. A writer possessing knowledge of the actual swift collapse of Poland in World War II and the enormous actual costs of far less ambitious space programs in a far less devastated world would have been unlikely to postulate such outcomes.<ref>Robert F. Vernon, "Reasoned and unreasoned speculations about what will be and what might have been" in Marcia Gracie (ed.) "Trends in Speculative Fiction", New York, 1998</ref> ''[[2001: A Space Odyssey (film)|2001: A Space Odyssey]]'' was set in the future and featured developments in space travel and habitation  which have not occurred on the timescale postulated.

A problem with future history science fiction is that it will date and be overtaken by real historical events, for instance H. Beam Piper's future history, which included a [[Nuclear warfare|nuclear war]] in 1973, and much of the future history of ''[[Star Trek]]''. [[Jerry Pournelle]]'s "[[CoDominium]]" future history assumed that the [[Cold War]] would end with the United States and Soviet Union establishing a co-rule of the world, the CoDominium of the title, which would last into the 22nd Century—rather than the Soviet Union collapsing in 1991.

There are several ways this is dealt with. One solution to the problem is when some authors set their stories in an indefinite future, often in a society where the current calendar has been disrupted due to a [[societal collapse]] or undergone some form of distortion due to the impact of technology. Related to the first, some stories are set in the very remote future and only deal with the author's contemporary history in a sketchy fashion, if at all (e.g. the original ''Foundation'' Trilogy by Asimov). Another related case is where stories are set in the near future, but with an explicitly [[Alternate history|allohistorical]] past, as in [[Ken MacLeod]]'s ''[[The Engines of Light Trilogy|Engines of Light]]'' series.

In other cases, the merging of the fictional history and the known history is done through extensive use of [[retroactive continuity]]. In yet other cases, such as the ''[[Doctor Who]]'' television series and the fiction based on it, much use is made of secret history, in which the events that take place are largely secret and not known to the general public.

As with Heinlein, some authors simply write a detailed future history and accept the fact that events will overtake it, making the sequence into a ''[[de facto]]'' [[alternate history]].

Lastly, some writers formally transform their future histories into [[alternate history]], once they had been overtaken by events. For example, Poul Anderson started The Psychotechnic League history in the early 1950s, assuming a nuclear war in 1958—then a future date. When it was republished in the 1980s, a new foreword was added explaining how that history's timeline diverged from ours and led to war.