fictional dates of the old solar system

[ + links to:  Brackett, Bradbury and "past-future" dates  -  Synchronicities of 1967  -  The chronology of Captain Future  -  Looking ahead with excitement to 1981  -  Uranian Eras ]

fictional-dates-pic

The dates of imagined events lend interest to a story, and help to characterize it. 

If the dates are still in our future, they link the tale to us via the chain of year-numbers. If on the other hand the dates are in our past but in the author's future (like, for example, stories written in the 1930s but set in the 1980s), they piquantly contribute to the history of expectations - 

Harlei:  Or to put it another way, the history of what might have been. Particularly in our sub-genre!  The entire OSS is a rich field for nostalgic might-have-beens.  "If only the planets had been habitable / inhabited, if only cheap space travel had been invented, if only this, if only that."  To give a date to a fictional event is to rub in the "if-only" with extra bitter-sweetness.

Zendexor:  And yet you get some critics who complain that dating a story makes it somewhat...er...dated. 

Harlei:  They just don't get it.  Like those who say that Apollo 11 destroyed the readability of fictional first journeys to the Moon because it made them "out of date", as though from July 1969 onwards readers might as well throw  Operation Columbus into the trash bin.  I'm not trying to knock reality, I realize it has its points, but Operation Columbus actually has Apollo 11 beat hollow -

Zendexor:  Well, we can simply say to all that, "Fiction is reality.  A book is a thing that exists.  The ideas in it exist - "

Harlei:  - though it's a pity Hugh Walters doesn't give us a date for the events in Operation Columbus...

Zendexor:  Never mind, we do have the dates of other first-trips-to-the-moon (for example see below, under "1975", "1978" and "2026").

And there are some dates which refer to the far more distant past, since the OSS is really old - that is, it's backed in its own terms by a venerable timeline, as well as "old" in the other sense of being outdated.

Future researchers might model a two- or even three-dimensional "date-space" as outlined in the Diary, Complex Dates.  And if that ever happens, maybe the following list may be of some use as a starter.

One last point: at first the timeline was solely concerned with OSS science fiction, but now I put interstellar events in as well, whenever I come across them.

Happy browsing, folks.


dates and events

1,195,854 B.C.

Beginning of Era One on Uranus (calculated from information given in Uranian Gleams).

50,000 B.C.

I talked with the mind of...  a general of the great-headed brown people who held South Africa in 50,000 B.C.  [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

33,000 B.C.

Phsthpok departs Pak [Protector (1973].

32,800 B.C.

First emigration wave departs Pak [Protector (1973)].

32,500 B.C.

Second emigration wave departs Pak [Protector (1973)].

29,000 B.C.  

Year One in the reckoning of the hidden Martian colony on Earth [A Mirror For Observers (1955)].

15,000 B.C.

I talked with the mind of... Crom-Ya, a Cimmerian chieftain of 15,000 B.C...  [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

3417 B.C.   

..."Let me explain, doctor," he purred, "just what you are up against.  We're a very old organization, very old.  Our leader group, which you see before you, can trace itself back to the year 3417 B.C.  When a member dies, the survivors after careful consideration, elect a replacement..."   [The Rulers (1946)]

1861 B.C.   

The "Law of 27,140" (in the dating system of the Martian colony on Earth) states that no assistance can be given to Abdicators by the Martians of the Cities... but also that the Abdicators aren't to be acted against, so long as they do no positive harm.
                                                                                        [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

1827 B.C.

"And - we're still in the same place as we entered the corridor, aren't we?  But in the past.  How far?"

"By your reckoning, the late spring of 1827 B.C..."

...Eighteen hundred years before Christ, centuries before even Abraham, he sat camped in a Denmark which those people who called themselves Danes had yet to enter.  The strangeness seeped through him like a physical cold...

[The Corridors of Time (1965)]

200 B.C.

I talked with the mind of...  Theodotides, a Graeco-Bactrian official of 200 B.C...  [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

1327  

...He had lived more than six hundred years, as few Martians do.  His birth date was the year 1327 by the Western human calendar...  [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

1444

Henri Lothiere, apothecary's assistant of Paris, is snatched through time to the year 1944 [The Man Who Saw the Future (1930)]

1465    

Zerko Tarkomas, Ruler of the Moon, leads a scientific expedition to Earth [The Moon Conquerors (1930)].

1471   

In Drozma's web of wrinkles were scars from the surgery which, about five hundred years ago, had made his face presentably human.  His first mission into human society had been in 1471 (30,471), when he achieved the status of qualified Observer during the wars of York and Lancaster...   [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

1535

As best he could, he selected a line in the set corresponding to Anno Domini 1535.  Auri linked fingers with him and followed him trustingly through the curtain.

Again the long, still room, and the locker.  But the clothes stored here were something else from the Neolithic.  A variety of costumes was available, peasant, gentleman, priest, soldier, and more.  He didn't know which was best.  What the hell had gone on in Denmark of the sixteenth century?  Hell indeed, if the time war were involved...

[The Corridors of Time (1965)]

1482

A student named Carolus meets a stranded alien from another star system [The Power (1945)].

1710

From the journal of Qulqlan the Rthr, marooned on Earth:
   January 19, 1710.  Having come nigh to calamity with the near lofs of the key, I will henceforth keep this journal in the English tongue...    
                                                                          [A Trace of Memory (1963)]

1827   

The year that galactic undercover agents Gonyl and Algoric founded their vigil-station in Nebraska, to watch for possible invasion from the void.

"We were intrigued when we realized that this world bore a native human population.  We chose this area for its remoteness," he went on, "near the heart of an almost empty continent.  The year was 1827.  We felt we had chosen well..."

[The House in November (1970)]

1854    

...in 30,854 he completed the history of the Tasmanians, which is still the recognized Martian text...    [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

1859

This year is a date in a suggested, not-yet-written piece of fiction: see History of Hopes - The Hunt for Vulcan.

1866

Unexplained instantaneous transportation of Captain John Carter of Virginia from Arizona to the planet Mars (Barsoom), 4th March, 1866.  [A Princess of Mars (1912, 1917).]

1874

...On March 17, 1874, Ira Johnson, medical student, sat in the law offices of Deems, Wingate, Alden and Deems and listened to an unusual proposition...  [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

1875

'The first offspring resulting from unions assisted by the Howard Foundation were born in 1875...'                       [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

1899  

14th October: the first making of Cavorite.  [The First Men in the Moon, chapter 2]

1901

Death of the mental patient Joe Slater, and release of the cosmic entity which had been confined in him.  Not coincidentally, a nova appears near Algol.
                                                                      [Beyond the Wall of Sleep (1919, 1938)]

1907

On November 1, 1907, there had come to New Orleans police a frantic summons from the swamp and lagoon country to the south.  The squatters there, mostly primitive but good-natured descendants of Lafitte's men, were in the grip of stark terror from an unknown thing which had stolen upon them in the night.  It was voodoo, apparently, but voodoo of a more terrible sort than they had ever known; and some of their women and children had disappeared since the malevolent tom-tom had begun its incessant beating...

[The Call of Cthulhu (1928)]

1908

Inspector John Raymond Legrasse makes his report on the Cthulhu worshippers to the American Archaeological Society at its annual meeting in St. Louis.  [The Call of Cthulhu (1928)]

From The Lion of Comarre (1949):

The First Electronic Age, Peyton knew, had begun in 1908, more than eleven centuries before, with De Forest's invention of the triode...

[Note from Zendexor: the right date for this is 1906, not 1908, if Google Search informs me correctly.  Still, we're on a fictional time-line here...]

1920

Euthanasia made available in the US:

...It was, I remember, the 13th day of April, 1920, that the first Government Lethal Chamber was established on the south side of Washington Square, between Wooster Street and South Fifth Avenue...                        [The Repairer of Reputations, in The King in Yellow (1895)]

1925

Gustaf Johansen's encounter with Cthulhu [The Call of Cthulhu (1928)].

...Poor Johansen's handwriting almost gave out when he wrote of this.  Of the six men who never reached the ship, he thinks two perished of pure fright in that accursed instant...  After vigintillions of years great Cthulhu was loose again, and ravening for delight.

1927

A year replete with cosmic horror in Massachusetts (threatened by malign undersea powers) and Vermont (infiltrated from space).

It was I who fled frantically out of Innsmouth in the early morning hours of July 16, 1927, and whose frightened appeals for government inquiry and action brought on the whole reported episode.  [The Shadow Over Innsmouth (1931, 1936)]

The whole matter began, so far as I am concerned, with the historic and unprecedented Vermont floods of November 3, 1927.  I was then, as now, an instructor of literature at Miskatonic University...   [The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)] 

Note: the Vermont floods really did happen.

1928

Albert N Wilmarth discovers the dire secret of the Plutonian visitors to the wilds of Vermont.  [The Whisperer in Darkness (1931)] 

1932

9 December, dusk:  Time-traveller Ares Sen Kenlin (see 3059) is found unconscious by James Waters Bendell, on a roadside in the American West.  [Twilight (1934)]

1934   

18 May:  date of the letter from mining engineer Robert B F Mackenzie of Pilbarra, Western Australia, to Professor Nathaniel Wingate Peaslee, c/o the American Psychological Society, New York City, concerning worked stone blocks found in the Australian desert: artefacts so aicient that they seem to confirm the time-visions which Peaslee had published.  
                                                                    [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)] 

9 August:  Battle of the California Coast.  The battleship Minnesota uses a radar-like invention to save the US from defeat by an enemy who had won control of the Pacific.  [Politics (1932)]

1935

"Ready, Bill?" asked Harl Swanson.  Bill Kressman nodded.

"Then kiss 1935 goodbye!" cried the giant Swede, and swung over the lever.

[The World of the Red Sun (1931)]

3rd June:
It was on Monday, June 3, that we saw the first of the half-buried blocks.  I cannot describe the emotions with which I actually touched - in objective reality - a fragment of Cyclopean masonry in every respect like the blocks in the walls of my dream-buildings.  There was a distinct trace of carving - and my hands trembled as I recognised part of a curvilinear decorative scheme made hellish to me through years of tormenting nightmare and baffling research.                                      [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

17-18 July: dreadful confirmation of Man's place in the universe:

After twenty-two years of nightmare and terror, saved only by a desperate conviction of the mythical source of certain impressions, I am unwilling to vouch for the truth of that which I think I found in Western Australia on the night of July 17-18, 1935.  There is reason to hope that my experience was wholly or partly an hallucination - for which, indeed, abundant causes existed.  And yet, its realism was so hideous that I sometimes find hope impossible.

If the thing did happen, then man must be prepared to accept notions of the cosmos, and of his own place in the seething vortex of time, whose merest mention is paralysing...

[The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

1939

Appearance (on 5th June) of The Machine-Man of Ardathia (1927) from A.D. 29,940.

1941

Miss Betty Mordan is reluctantly inveigled into an adventure in time with Roy Saber from 1951 [Wanderers of Time (1933)]

Interplanetary invasion:

Sergeant Evan Paige's gray, brooding eyes stared reflectively at the paper in his hand, dated three days before, June 7, 1941.  Under the official seal of Washington it read:

"Emergency draft.  All men able to bear arms, ages 14 to 55, in defense of Earth against the invaders from Mars.  Your country and your world need you.  REPORT AT THE NEAREST RECRUITING OFFICE IMMEDIATELY."
                                                                            

                                                                                  [One Thousand Miles Below (1940)]

From Dormant (1948):

...At the very hub of the screaming waters lay Iilah, dead now almost for ever, forgotten by time and the universe.

Early in 1941, Japanese ships came and ran the gauntlet of dangerous waters into the quiet lagoon...

1942    

Determined to meet a Selenite, whom she has observed in the Mare Crisium by means of her giant telescope, Miss Dorothy Brewster leads an expedition to the Moon in Earth's first spaceship, the magnetically-launched Astronaut.  [The Moon Conquerors (1930).]

1943

11 September:  Dr Homer Green undergoes the experiment which makes his tissues invariant (see 2170) [Invariant (1944)]

1944

Descent of airmen Johnny Wild and Danny Black to the subterranean world of Red Valley [The Perilous Descent (1952)].

Atomic space-drive invented in secret [The Great Engine (1943)].

French scientists bring Henri Lothiere forward in time from the year 1444 [The Man Who Saw the Future (1930)].

1946   

Limited liaison between a motion-picture projector in 1946 and one in 2011.  [Film Library (1946)]

From Dormant (1948):

...Something stirred in the depths of Iilah's awareness of himself, something that he had intended to do.  He couldn't remember what.

That was the first real thought he had in late 1946, when he felt the impact of outside energy.  And stirred with returning life...

The cripple Hugh Hunter conceives the aim of an organization to catch war criminals, which later saves the world from mind-control by "Master Brug" [The Doomsday Brain (1967); see also 1955].

   ...Because he was a businessman, he hated all unfinished business...  When he spent some months in a private hospital in 1946, watching his legs wither and become useless, he had ample time to pause and think.  He drew up, for himself, a trial balance of the actual profit and loss of World War Two - not in material but in human terms.  It was then that he realized how much unfinished business still existed... 

1947

From Seedling of Mars (1931): 

It was in the fall of 1947, three days prior to the annual football game between Stanford and the University of California, that the strange visitor from outer space landed in the middle of the huge stadium at Berkeley where the game was to be held...

1948   

From The Great Engine (1943):

THE blue-gray engine lay half buried in a green hillside.  It lay there in that summer of 1948, a soulless thing of metal and of forces more potent than life itself...

1950  

...Now he was alive again, but in so dim a fashion that there was nothing to do but wait for the end.  He waited.

In 1950 he watched the destroyer float towards him...        [Dormant (1948)]

1951

Roy Saber sets off on his adventure in time [Wanderers of Time (1933)].

1952   

Some of the members of the 1942 Brewster expedition to the Moon now return to Earth, long after they were given up for lost [The Moon Conquerors (1930)].

1954

According to No Man Friday (1956), p14, the Americans secretly launched the first artificial satellite in this year.   (Four years in advance of reality, and the reality differed in being not secret, of course.) 

From Evans of the Earth-Guard (1930):

...in 1954, the first crude rocket had thundered out from earth into the great void toward its shining satellite.  Neither that rocket nor the twenty-first had reached their goal, but the next one had.

1955

According to No Man Friday (1956) this is the year the Russians sent up their satellite - secretly, just like the Americans.  (In reality, when it did happen two years later, the Russians, who were first in space, were happy for the world to know it.)

In the preamble to Into the 28th Century (1930) we are informed that

...In the year 1955 peace was restored to the stricken planet, reconstruction began, and the World-State elected a woman, known as the World President, as its Chief Executive...

For 1955 as the present (according to John Varley) see the OSS Diary, 7th December 2016.

Colonel Lawrence Kingsley is recruited by half-blind multi-millionaire Hugh Hunter to become executive director of an organization to catch war criminals [The Doomsday Brain (1967); see also 1946]:

"There is a chair in front of you," the voice continued.  "I trust you will find it comfortable."

He sat down gingerly and waited...  As he became more used to the darkness he thought he could make out a dim figure seated opposite him; he even believed that he could trace the outline of an invalid chair of unusual proportions...  

1956

First manned atomic rocket launched [The Legion of Space (1937, 1947), p.12].

The year Jay Vickers walked the "enchanted valley": the one to which there's no going back:
   He had carried the dream for more than twenty years and now that the dream was coming true, he saw that it was tarnished with all the time between, that there was no going back to that day in 1956, that a man never can go back to a thing he once has left...
                                                                    [Ring Around the Sun (1952, 1953)]

...and later the records show "Vickers, Jay... l.t. June 20, 1956" - l.t. standing for "life transferred"...

From the alternate history recounted in the introduction to The Psychotechnic League (1981):
   Conflict was inevitable once Eisenhower's death from surgical complications elevated Nixon to the U.S. presidency in June, 1956.  Cold War paranoia distorted Nixon's reactions to unrest within the Communist bloc in the autumn of that year.  Covert U.S. aid to the Hungarian rebels so enraged the Soviet Union that it backed Egypt past the limits of prudence during the Suez Crisis.  The savage Mideast war that followed left Socialism dominant throughout the region and the U.S.S.R. in possession of northern Iran...   

1959 

SF authors don't claim to be prophets, but in guessing the year of the first probe to reach the Moon, Arthur C Clarke scored a direct hit in his Prelude to Space (written in 1947).  1959 was the year he said it would happen, and lo and behold, when 1959 came round, Lunik 2 hit the Moon in reality.

1959 is also the year when the mind of the unfortunate Hugh Macklin begins its temporal odyssey in Timeliner (1955).

1962    

14th June: the first pictures from the Russian Venus lander reveal humanoid life on Venus [The Sky People (2006)].

1963    

Elmis, the disguised Martian, begins his stint in Latimer, Massachusetts.  [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

1964

The Black Cloud is discovered on its approach to the Solar System, by Knud Jensen working at Mt Palomar [The Black Cloud (1957)].

1965

The catastrophic visit of the Black Cloud, and the fantastic discovery of its sentience by Cambridge scientist Chris Kingsley [The Black Cloud (1957)].

From Destination Mars (1963):

...He recalled the discovery of this distant belt of radiation by the French scientist Jules-Robert Le Prince.  Its presence had first been suspected back in 1965, when deep space probes registered an unexpected increase in radiation at a distance of some five million miles from the Earth...

1966  

This year, in my view, is the Present; what comes after is the increasingly weird future.  See the OSS Diary for 7th December 2016.

Robert Carson (1932-66), space pioneer, dies some days after his spacecraft Wanderer II is damaged by a meteor.  (Due to the trust fund established in his name he posthumously becomes, thousands of years later, The Man Who Owned the World (1961).

1967

April 1967: victory at last is achieved for the two Anglo-Saxon powers, the USA and Britain, after the long intermittent world war which began in 1914.  Then, on 10th June 1967, comes  "Mars Day" - the first intelligible public message from Barsoom to Earth, broadcasting greetings to the world from the city of Helium.  [Prologue to The Moon Maid (1923).]

There's a strong hint in A Fall of Moondust (1961) that 1967 saw the Russians make the first Moon trip - thus celebrating the 50th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution.

The Uncertain Midnight (1958) has 1967 as the year of the "Nine Days Tranquiliser", a nuclear holocaust that reduces the population by a factor of roughly a thousand. 

A note in Brigands of the Moon (1930) implies that the "Yellow War" occurred in 1967.

1968

...The Republicans have been fresh out of ideas since '968, when the Democrat Clifford got in...     [A Mirror For Observers (1955)]

...Apparently London, Paris and Rome were in telephonic communication almost without a break, and the news of the great London landslide was telephoned to Madrid and thence radioed to Buenos Aires in 1968...           
                                                                 [The Shape of Things to Come (1933)]

1969

"...Many men lost their lives in trying to reach the Moon, and most people said it was impossible for them to do it - there was even a movement to get their attempts banned.  But the men went on trying.  Duncan, K.K.Smith and Sudden actually got there, but they crashed on the surface and were killed.  Then came the great Drivers.  In 1969 he managed to take his rocket right round the Moon and bring it safely back to Earth..."  [Stowaway to Mars (1936), p.23]

...On November 29, 1969, Robbins and Swain attempted a take-off from an Adirondack plateau.  But the erratic Wellston cyclotrons lived up to the predictions of the pessimists, and let go with a blast of power that destroyed the whole tail of the rocket and sent the main mass of the ship flying out into space with terrific impetus.  Robbins and Swain were undoubtedly killed instantly.

The wrecked craft was hurled roughly toward the asteroid Eros, and took up a loose orbit around that little world as a tiny satellite...

[Eros (1942)]

1971

On 27 February 1971 Howard Lester, narrator of The Philosopher's Stone, under goes the operation on his pre-frontal cortex which increases his willpower...

In Captain Future's Challenge (1940) 1971 is cited as the date space exploration began:

Gravium was the very life-blood of interplanetary civilization.  For without it, gravitation-equalizers could not be made.  And without equalizers, men didn't dare visit other planets of greater or lesser gravitation than their own.

The first space explorers, back in 1971, had found that out.  Landing on worlds of lesser gravitation than Earth, their circulation, internal organs, their whole anatomy, were damaged.  All were sickened, many crippled and killed...

1972

The last mighty air war of 1972, which had ended in the total abolition of all national boundaries and the establishment of the World Government with its headquarters in the new world-capital of New York, had brought peace to the world, but it had also brought some measure of monotony...   [The Universe Wreckers (1930)]

The great plague is released by an unbalanced member of the Organic Unity Party [A Mirror For Observers (1955)].

1973

First trip to the Moon - but no return to Earth [Blindness (1935)].

Anti-science measures enacted in the first session of the 93rd Congress [Trends (1939)]:

...the famous Stonely-Carter Bill was passed.  It established the Federal Scientific Research Investigatory Bureau - the FSRIB - which was given full power to pass on the legality of all research in the country.  Every laboratory, industrial or scholastic, was required to file information, in advance, on all projected research before this new bureau, which could, and did, ban absolutely all such as it disapproved of...    

Catastrophic earthquake, the greatest in historic times [The Great Nebraska Sea (1963)]:

...It had been a particularly hot and dry August, and the Forestry Service was keeping an anxious eye out for the fires it knew it could expect.  Dense smoke was reported rising above a virtually uninhabited area along Black Squirrel Creek, and a plane was sent out for a report.

The report was - no fire at all.  The rising cloud was not smoke, but dust...

...By September 23rd the Fault was active well into Wyoming on the north, and rapidly approaching the border of New Mexico to the south...

...All through October, hollow-eyed motorists flocked into Tulsa, Topeka, Omaha, Sioux Falls and Fargo...

...Today, nearly one hundred years after the unprecedented - and happily unrepeated - disaster, it is hard to remember the terror and despair of those weeks in October and November, 1973.  It is inconceivable to think of the United States without its beautiful and economically essential curve of interior ocean...      

1974

The anti-science act of the previous year (see under 1973) is challenged [Trends (1939)]:

The inevitable appeal to the supreme court came on November 9, 1974, in the case of Westly vs. Simmons in which Joseph Westly of Stanford upheld his right to continue his investigations on atomic power on the grounds that the Stonely-Carter act was unconstitutional...

It was rumoured at first that the court would declare the act unconstitutional, and monster parades were held in every large town against this eventuality.  The League of the Righteous brought its powerful influence to bear - and even the supreme court submitted.  It was five to four for constitutionality.  Science strangled by the vote of one man  

1975

At 0150 G.M.T. on December 1st, 1975, every telephone in the world started to ring....         [Dial F for Frankenstein (1962)] - full telephone interconnection unexpectedly creates an emergent intelligence.

War breaks out between the USA and the Sino-Japanese Federation [The Dimension of Chance (1932)]

"Selenine, derived from a fossil lichen found by the first rocket-expedition to the moon in 1975, has, as you know, practically wiped out the old-time curse of cancer..."       [The Plutonian Drug (1934)]

1976

US Secret Service operative Clement Morris encounters Japanese agent Sakamoto in The Dimension of Chance (1932).

Selenite ruins on Farside are "discovered by the circumlunar expedition of 1976" - see The Archives of the Moon.

First Mars expedition discovers the Doorway:  an interstellar transportation system.

It was a cubicle of something that looked like slick brown glass.  Ten feet high, six wide and deep.  Inside, at waist level, on the far wall, a lever - curiously shaped, like the head of an old-fashioned walking stick, the slightly curved bar of the L parallel to the wall.  Nothing more than that...                                                                                               [Ticket to Anywhere (1952)]

Sitting US President Jefferson Dayles faces a woman candidate in the election.

...She seemed to be aware of all the pitfalls, and though Dayles' agents kept a complete check on every statement and speech that she made in public, the months went by and she did not slip, and she did not fall.

Dayles observed the performance from a distance, at first with disbelief and then with admiration, but finally with alarm.  "She's got to get tired," he said.  "One of these days she'll be so exhausted she can scarcely stand, and that's the moment for our people to trip her up."

Whatever could be said about the rationality of the candidate did not apply to her followers.  The millennium was about to arrive.  Women could end war, bring peace to the troubled world.  They would right the wrongs of society, control the rapaciousness of business, and once and for all they would end the infidelity of the American male...

[Moonbeast (1963)]

Neville Yeadon, unaware that his mind is soon to be translated to Uranus, is enjoying his lunch hour and the thought that he won't have to work at Kagan Cartons much longer:

The fact that I'll soon be employed elsewhere has, paradoxically, brought back to me some of the buzz I used to derive from working in central London.  Call it the Affectionate Departure Syndrome, with the affection dependent upon the departure.

Nevertheless - it's funny - a week and a half has gone since I gave in my notice at Kagan Cartons, and still I can hardly believe I'm free.  The benign, slow-motion bombshell of Fact is only gradually blasting its way into my intelligence; the full delight of its truth has yet to seep in through every mental pore.  All the same, there's no room for doubt; I've been reliably notified of my good fortune.  So, while Britain swelters, and cold drinks do a roaring trade, I swig the draught of secret happiness.  In future years, while the country remembers 1976 for its heatwave, I shall remember it for my release...

Robert Gibson, Uranian Throne episode 10: The Londoner

Just a hundred years ago, back in 1976, the first men landed on the Moon...
            [Journey by Earthlight in The Challenge of the Spaceship (1958)]

1977

From The Immeasurable Horror (1931):

I was with the first Venusian expedition, under the leadership of Admiral Carfax, in 1977.  We were able to make no more than a mere landing, and were then compelled to return earthward because of our shortage of oxygen, due to a serious miscalculation regarding our needs.  It was unsafe, we found, to breathe the thick, vapor-laden air of Venus for more than short intervals...

4 July 1977: Asher Sutton, man of destiny, comes from the future to encounter his ancestor John H Sutton, in a pasture in Wisconsin.  [Time And Again (1951)]

From Blindness (1935):

...Garnall was drowned in Lake Erie, after returning from Luna, the first man to reach Earth again, alive.  He didn't go on living, of course, but he was alive when he reached Earth.  That we knew.

From Martian Blood (2013):

...no one knew for sure whether the planet was inhabited until Ares I landed there in 1977...

11th August 1977:  Floyd Jones born, in Colorado [The World Jones Made (1956)].

The Refuge is constructed in that same year (p.6) - a building containing a simulation of the Venusian environment, to house a group of people biologically engineered in preparation for that environment.

From The Overman Culture (1971), p.173, the testament of the Mormon, Julius Overman, begins as follows:

"I was born in the year 1977 in London, England, to which corrupt and decadent country I shall not return until time and the will of God have wrought great and cleaning changes..."

From Theory of Rocketry (1958):

...Mr. Edel taught six English classes that year at Richard M. Nixon High School, and the classes averaged seventy-five pupils each...

1977 is the year in which the action of Ring Around the Sun (1952, 1953) takes place.

It had been the blade at first, the razor blade that would not wear out.  And after that the lighter than never failed to light, that required no flints and never needed filling.  Then the light bulb that burned forever if it met no accident.  Now it was the Forever car...     

1978

The year of the first voyage to the Moon in both Prelude to Space (written in 1947) and The Man Who Sold the Moon (1949, 1951).  Also it is the year of the first flight round the Moon, albeit without a landing, in Trends (1939).

Regarding The Man Who Sold the Moon: the date of the flight is not given in the story itself, but it appears in Heinlein's own Future History time-chart:  "First rocket to the Moon, 1978".

From Frogheads (2015):

"You've been on Venus thirty years?"  Ronson seized the chance to change the subject.  "That means you would have belonged to one of the first expeditions."

"Da."  He nodded vigorously.  "Second expedition, 1978.  Chief petty officer, Soviet Space Force."

From Trends (1939):

The nadir of science came in the spring of 1978, a bare month before the completion of the New Prometheus, with the passing of the 'Easter Edict' - it was issued the day before Easter.  By it, all independent research or experimentation was absolutely forbidden.  The FSRIB [see 1973] thereafter reserved the right to allow only such research as it specifically requested.

 - However, that same year the first successful circumlunar flight, carried out in defiance of authority, brings about a popular change of heart.

1979

From The Immeasurable Horror (1931), narrating the Second Venusian Expedition:

In 1979 we went back, more fully equipped for all contingencies this time, and landed on a high plateau near the equator.

From The Earth Killers (1949):   17th July is B-Day - the "Bomb Day" when the USA suffers a nuclear attack; 40 million people killed.

The first expedition to the Moon [The Moon is Hell (1951)].

1980

The year of the secret Venusian invasion of Earth, in Three to Conquer (1956).

It was also, in Master of the Asteroid (1932), the year of the disappearance of the Selenite,

...the first known rocket ship to dare the zone of the asteroids.

At the time of its disappearance, fifty years ago, in 1980, a dozen voyages had been made to Mars and a rocket base had been established in Syrtis Major...

In 1980 was passed the UN Extraterrestrial Protection Act [The Sky People (2006), p108].

On page 40 of The Simulacra (1964) we learn that the "fracas of 1980" saw the Oregon-North California region hit by Red Chinese guided nuclear missiles.

From The Universe Maker (1953):

"We Shadows," she began, "are trying to undo the effects of the psychological disaster that demoralized the human race, beginning in the Twentieth Century.  The pressure of civilization was apparently too much for millions of people.  Everywhere men sought to escape and they found the means late in 1980 in the newly invented floaters....

From an article in Captain Future Spring 1941:

...The Mercurians had attained a certain civilization before ever the first Earthmen had opened the spaceways and visited the planet, in 1980.  They did not have the mighty past of the Martians, but they had achieved progress commensurate with their numbers...

1981

First trip to Venus - in spaceship Astarte whose log is found over a century later in Space Cadet (1948).

First trip to Mars - when the Gloria Mundi blasts off from Salisbury Plain [Stowaway to Mars (1936), p.31].

The few hardy souls who had elected to spend the night upon the open inhospitality of Salisbury Plain slept no later than dawn upon the morning of the twelfth of October, 1981, for it was with the first rays of sunlight that the influx which would last all day began...

1982

The premature explosion of the seventeenth Mars-rocket ushered in the year 1982...  [Dreadful Sanctuary (1948)]

Birth of Susan Calvin [I, Robot (1950)].

1983

...They were used to being frisked, ever since that fanatic Alaska nationalist publisher emptied a .32 at then-President Hutzmeyer in '83... [Critical Mass (1962)]

1984

First expedition to Mars, according to Transit of Earth (1971).

1985

First expedition to Ganymede, according to Farmer in the Sky (1950).

From History Lesson (1949)]:

...a strangely shaped piece of metal, showing the coloration of intense heat.  It was, in its way, the most pathetic of all these symbols from the past, for it told of Man's greatest achievement and of the future he might have known.  The mahogany stand on which it was mounted bore a silver plate with the inscription:

Auxiliary igniter from starboard jet of spaceship.
          Morning Star, Earth-Moon, A D 1985  

1987

11 July 1987, at Bridport, Wisconsin:  John H Sutton writes the letter that will be found by his remote descendant Asher Sutton over six thousand years later, in 7990, setting in train a series of events in the time-war between supporters and opponents of Asher Sutton's idea of universal destiny.  [Time And Again (1951)]

...We were reviewing events after the war between the Russo-Anglo-American Alliance and the Chinese Hegemony, 1987 and following... 
                                                                             [Starship Troopers (1960)]

"...The Treaty of Santa Fe, signed at the ancient New Mexican city in 1987, partitioned the Solar System.  Venus was granted to the Sino-Nipponese Empire, which America had re-established after World War III.  Mars was assigned to the Western Union of Europe, then dominated by Germany.  The satellites of Jupiter, believed to be unreachable and absolutely valueless, went as a contemptuous sop to Russia, which had been too far enfeebled by war and its own Soviet rule to resent such an insult.  Luna alone was reserved for America..."

[Seetee Shock (1949,1950)]

"First," he said, "read me the Pigeon Report - you know, from the Brief History.  I want to see if I remember it right."

"Chapter Two," said the voice promptly.  "First contact with a non-Solar intelligence was made by Commander Ralph C. Pigeon on July 1st, 1987, during an emergency landing on Titan..."

[Stranger Station (1956)]

1988  

Mr Yee migrates to Mars to set up his machine-repair business [Martian Time-Slip (1964), p.20].

April 3rd: during a world war between the "white" and "yellow" races, there's trouble in a lab in the Rockies, where Professor Laura Hart has accelerated plant evolution to replace warlike humanity with a supposedly more peaceful species...  [The Bloodless Peril (1937)]

Appalled by the news of a nuclear attack on Damascus, mathematician Lucas Hutchman decides to build a "neutron resonator" with which he can force all world governments to disassemble and abandon all nuclear weapons.  His communication to world leaders includes a description of the device, which is able to cause detonation of every nuclear device on the planet, information that the contraption already exists, and an ultimatum that it will be activated at noon GMT on 10th November 1988.  "YOU MUST NOW ACT ACCORDINGLY!"                                           [The Peace Machine (1971, 1985)]

1989

...a secret Department of Defence study, Project BARSOOM, which had been carried out by Harvard's School of Psychology in 1989.  In this experiment in controlled sociology, various sample populations had been assured that the human race had made contact with extraterrestrials....
                                                                           [2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)]

In Indoctrinaire (1970, 1979), 1989 is the year of World War Three:

   In July 1989...  the first stage of the war took place when the post-revolutionary Cuban society invaded the south-eastern tip of the United States...  For eight incredible days, the tiny force of Cubans, representing virtually the whole of the country's armed forces, had fought their way three hundred miles up the Floriday peninsula.  Cape Canaveral had fallen to them, and the space-centre destroyed.  Finally, in a massive counter-attack, in which the Americans had used almost every kind of weapon available to them, the invasion force had been wiped out...

1990

June 1990: Roger and Elaine Newton, hunted by bad guys who want to steal Newton's inventions, decide to seek refuge on the Moon.  Elaine is pregnant with the son who will become Captain Future.  See chapter 2 of Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1939, 1967).  (Interestingly, although there are planetary colonies, the Moon has been left alone so far, being considered useless.)

"Ten weeks later" they set off for the Moon.  And there, "a little later" (i.e. probably still in 1990), their baby boy Curtis is born.

The idea of the "dude farm" is put forward as a way of preserving old ways in an age of mechanisation.  [City (1952), p.31]

Expedition led by the Cornell brothers sets out for Pluto [The Plutonian Drug (1934)].  (Returns in 1996.)

Round about this year, according to The Simulacra (1964), p.20, the position of First Lady begins to assume a stature greater than that of the President.

A hundred years further on, in 2090, the house of Claus Coman in A Man of Double Deed (1965) is an ancient but well-preserved relic of the days before the Atomic Disaster of 1990.

1991

The Great Supernova of 1991   [The Crucible of Power (1939)]

1992

From The Shadow of Heaven (1969):

...In 1992, almost a century ago, World War III had come and gone, and none of the theoreticians had been able to predict what form it would take.  It had always been assumed that the Big War would annihilate most of the population and turn the major countries into vast uninhabited areas similar to what they had been in pre-history.  That had been the first misconception.  Humanity had survived practically unscathed - the only real casualty had been the land itself.

The second mistake had been in the assumption that - if war came - America, Russia and China would fight it out among themselves in one or another of the few simple permutations possible.  In the real event, America, Russia, and China had found themselves on the same side; and they never did find out for certain who the opposition was.  The enemy had assembled his forces, struck, and retired to safety before any of the Big Three discovered the war had started.

The first indication had come when the soil began to die...

1993 

In 1993 President Moraga signed into law the bill that terminated American economic development on Luna...  [Time Out of Joint (1959)]

...in 1993 an Australian scientist had stumbled on the force field and, almost by accident, given mankind the stars...                                        [Takeover Bid (1965)]

...The cloud of anti-neutrinos was first observed crossing the orbit of Jupiter on the third day of January, 1993 - and, because of the extreme difficulty of detecting its existence at all, the astronomers were quite content to use the term 'cloud' in their early reports.  It was not until a month had passed that they dropped the word and inserted in its place the more accurate, though highly emotive, phrase 'rogue planet'...                                   [A Wreath of Stars (1976)]

1994

Later, as she sat in her robe at the kitchen table drinking coffee, her plate of toast and apple-sauce before her, she looked out on the sight of the ditch-rider arriving in his little flat-bottom boat which put-putted up the canal in its official way, never hurrying and yet always arriving on schedule.  This was 1994, the second week in August.  They had waited eleven days, and now they would receive their share of water from the great ditch which passed by their line of houses a mile to the Martian north.   [Martian Time-Slip (1964), p.16]

...In February of 1994 a battle broke out at Base One, the nominal capital of the Lunar colonies.  Soldiers from the nearby missile base were set upon by colonists, and a five-hour pitched encounter was fought.  That night, special troop-transporting ships left Earth for Luna...  [Time Out of Joint (1959)]

Australia, population 35 million, is on the threshold of discovering a means of interstellar travel.  Col. Peter Chart, R.A.A.F., takes off in a force-bubble at near-light speed, and is physically recovered but catatonic... 

...Nobody had bargained for the immense expansion that would follow the opening up of Australia to Asian immigrants and the impetus this would give to the development of the inland desert.  Up to 1970 settlement was in most cases confined to a narrow strip of coastline seldom more than one hundred miles wide.  Now, in 1994, there were market gardens in the far west where once a farmer had been lucky to graze two sheep to the acre, and they were well on their way to planting wheat where Lake Eyre had once turned a white mirror of dried salt to the sun.                                                [Takeover Bid (1965)]

The Neptunians begin to tamper with the rotation of the Sun:

It was on the third day of May, 1994, that the world received its first news of the strange behavior of the sun...  [The Universe Wreckers (1930)]

West Germany enters the Union as the 53rd of the United States in 1994 according to page 25 of The Simulacra (1964).

1995   

Astronomers observing Mercury detect an apparently artificial structure at the planet's north pole [Fire Pattern (1984)].

4th April: first encounter between security agent Cussick and the future world-dictator Floyd Jones [The World Jones Made (1956)].

He always remembered that day; the spring air was cool and full of new growth.  The war had ended the year before.

...In those days he had been idealistic...  the task of suppressing extremist political and religious sentiment had, in 1995, seemed merely bureaucratic...

1996

Johnny Dahlquist foils an attempt by his superiors in the Interplanetary Patrol to stage a coup d'état.  [The Long Watch (1949); date given in Space Cadet.]

The January 14, 1996 copy of Time has a picture of a world-saver on the cover and his biography inside - while the man himself had believed he was living in 1959 [Time Out of Joint (1959)]:

RAGLE GUMM - MAN OF THE YEAR

"...forlorn, frozen Pluto, which only one terrestrial expedition has so far visited - the expedition led by the Cornell brothers, John and Augustine, which started in 1990 and did not return to earth till 1996, when nearly everyone had given it up as lost.  John, as you may have heard, died during the returning voyage, together with half the personnel of the expedition: and the others reached earth with only one reserve oxygen-tank remaining..."  [The Plutonian Drug (1934)]

...If only Crockhouse had been elected in '96 instead of Braden, with his packed ballots in Indiana and Puerto Rico!                                 [Critical Mass (1962)]

Expedition to Mercury to investigate what to telescopic observers seems like an artificial alien object [Fire Pattern (1984)].

Expedition into the Mare Crisium:

...the Sea of Crises.  Three hundred miles in diameter - and almost completely surrounded by a ring of magnificent mountains, it had never been explored until we entered it in the late summer of 1996.

Our expedition was a large one.  We had two heavy freighters which had flown our supplies and equipment from the main lunar base in the Mare Serenitatis, five hundred miles away...

[The Sentinel (1951)]

The first space flight was made by Robert Roth in 1996.  Roth visited Venus and Mars...  
                                                          [The Three Planeteers (1940)]

1997

By means of an electronic probe, Gilbert Austin and Wolfgang Reich discover the ruins of Kadath two miles below the surface of Karatepe, Turkey.  [The Mind Parasites (1967), p.36]

Headline, 7th April 1997:

VENUSIAN ORE DEPOSITS OBJECT OF DISPUTE

[Time Out of Joint (1959), p.119]

Revolution in Saudi Arabia [The Ceres Solution (1981), p.50].

The birth of Hal 9000:

"I am a Hal Nine Thousand computer, Production Number 3.  I became operational at the Hal plant in Urbana, Illinois on January 12, 1997..."
                                                                                [2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)]

1998

The Falling Sickness first attacked workers in a Greenland radium mine, in 1998.  [The Crucible of Power (1939)]

"Upon the 14th of April, AD 1998, all was prepared for the great test.  My financial affairs had been settled with an eye to the future in more ways than one.  The time-travel room, lavishly set with windows and looking like a very large telephone kiosk, stood waiting in the middle of Farmer Wright's field.  As I walked towards it, not knowing what Fate held in store for me, I thought what an incongruous object it looked standing amid the furrows.  Without the slightest hesitation, I unlocked the door, stepped inside and relocked it, started the air-purifying apparatus, took one last look at Earth, fresh with the aura of spring, and closed the projector switch..."  [Seeker of Tomorrow (1937)]

Shipping people between planets was expensive, even in this year of grace 1998...  [Swords of Zar-Tu-Kan (2013)]

Ragle Gumm finds out it's not 1959 [Time Out of Joint (1959)]

The third expedition of Mark Carew [Treasure on Thunder Moon (1942)].

1999

The first two expeditions to Mars - as told in The Martian Chronicles (1950) - come to grief.

Thorn Laurel, father of Aline Laurel, is killed around Uranus [Treasure on Thunder Moon (1942)].

From The Mind Parasites (1967):
...Without consulting anyone about it, a group of five hundred of us decided that the moon would have to be detached from earth's gravitational field.  We commenced work on this operation in January 1999...

"Lovecraft and the Kadath Inscriptions", a lecture delivered by Dr Gilbert Austin before the New York Historical Society on 18th June, 1999.  - footnote in The Mind Parasites (1967).

2000

Date of the Saturnian visit to Earth in Crisis 2000 (1959).

We read in The Martian Chronicles (1950) how the Third Expedition to Mars, in April 2000, is bamboozled by the Martians.

22 Feb: date of Moon's departure from Earth orbit, in The Mind Parasites (1967).

2001

The year of 2001 - A Space Odyssey (1968).  In other words, the first expedition to the environs of Saturn (according to the book) or Jupiter (according to the film).  (This tale is only borderline OSS - I include it here because after all its expectations do shed some light on the Old Space Program.)

According to The Martian Chronicles (1950) the Fourth Expedition to Mars, in June 2001, finds that the Martians have been more or less wiped out by disease brought by previous Earth expeditions.

Second space flight, in which Robert Roth visits Jupiter and Saturn, but crashes upon his return to Earth, and lives only two days.     [The Three Planeteers (1940)]

2002   

The rise of Jones to power [The World Jones Made (1956)]. 

Gretana ty Iltha, from the plan Mollan, arrives secretly on Earth:

This is May 10th, 2002 AD.  I am Greta Rushton, aged twenty-one, unmarried, American citizen, but grew up in Aberdeen, Scotland - which accounts for any atypical features of my accent or unfamiliarity with current American usage.  My father was an oil company executive.  Both he and my mother were killed in the Saudi Arabian revolution of 1997, but their overseas investments provide me with an adequate income which lets me indulge my interest in travel...

The Ceres Solution (1981), p.50

2003

...the great Witness Revival of 2003...  [Bridge (1952)]

From I, Robot (1950):

...Most of the world governments banned robot use on Earth for any purpose other than scientific research between 2003 and 2007...

2004

From Seeker of Tomorrow (1937):  re the Dublin-New York rocket flight of 2004:  "Not to be outdone, another fool starts out from Dublin and plunges clean through a skyscraper in New York, smearing himself all - "

In 2004 the child-cripple Denny Hargate has his first, apparently magical, glimpse of the interstellar traveller Gretana at Cotter's Edge [The Ceres Solution (1981), prologue].

[ibid., page 58:]

Spring came early in 2004, bringing unconscious relief from a hard winter in which power cuts and commodity shortages had been particularly severe...

2005

War on Earth causes most settlers on Mars to head back to the home planet - The Martian Chronicles (1950).

In August, a meeting in New York which has fateful consequences:

...Out of the infinite combinations there must always come the point at which Van Field Ruyter stood by the master control in the year 2005.  It would be so forever and forever.  And forever and forever would Stanley King and Merl Hudson, torn from their rightful lives, be sundered and dispersed, partaking of all possible experience, until again they were returned to that inevitable moment in the year 2005, when the cycle would begin all over without end -  

[Finality Unlimited (1936)]

2007

Invasion of Earth by parasites from Titan [The Puppet Masters (1951)]:
   For me it started too early on July 12th, '07, with my phone shrilling in a frequency guaranteed to peel off the skull.  The sort of phone my Section uses is not standard; the audio relay was buried surgically under the skin back of my left ear - bone conduction.  I felt around my person, then recalled that I had left it in my jacket across the room.  'All right,' I growled.  'I hear you.  Shut off that damned noise.'
   'Emergency,' a voice said in my ear.  'Report in person.'

From Seeker of Tomorrow (1937):  DAILY VOICE headline of May 22, 2007:  NEW ROCKET RECORD - TO N.Z. IN EIGHTEEN HOURS.

2 Feb:  Spaceship Pallas departs for Pluto [The Mind Parasites (1967)]

From I, Robot (1950):

...Most of the world governments banned robot use on Earth for any purpose other than scientific research between 2003 and 2007...

2008   

Susan Calvin obtains her Ph.D. and joins U.S.Robots as a "robopsychologist" [I, Robot (1950)].

Norman Muller is selected by Multivac as the statistically average voter to stand in for the entire electorate:

...The historians would speak soberly of the Muller Election of 2008.  That would be its name, the Muller Election.

The publicity, the better job, the flash flood of money that interested Sarah so much, occupied only a corner of his mind.  It would all be welcome, of course.  He couldn't refuse it.  But at the moment something else was beginning to concern him.

A latent patriotism was stirring.  After all, he was representing the entire electorate.  He was the focal point for them.  He was, in his own person, for this one day, all of America!

[Franchise (1955)]

2010

In 2010 A.D. it was estimated that nineteen million people in the United States had become floaters or Planiacs.  The stay-at-home majority was shocked and economists predicted disaster for the land unless something was done to bring the skyriding population back to earth...            [The Universe Maker (1953)]

(see 2012)

2011   

Time-liaison between a film projector of 2011 and one of 1946.  [Film Library (1946)]

2012

From The Universe Maker (1953):

(see 2010)  When a hard-pressed Congress in 2012 tried to pass a law restricting sky-riding to vacations only, it was too late.  The voting power of the Planiacs frightened the house majority, and thereafter the floaters - who had themselves received a big scare - were a political force to be reckoned with...

From Trouble with Time (1960):

...It bore the certificate of the Mars Bureau of Antiquities, guaranteeing that "this full-scale reproduction is an exact copy of the so-called Siren Goddess, discovered in the Mare Sirenum by the Third Expedition, A.D. 2012 (A.M.23)".

2015

From chapter 1 of The Moon Maid (1923):

In 2015 Mars had dispatched a ship for Earth with a crew of five men provisioned for ten years.  It was hoped that with good luck the trip might be made in something less than five years, as the craft had developed an actual trip speed of one thousand miles per hour.  At the time of my graduation the ship was already off its course almost a million miles and generally conceded to be hopelessly lost.

From I, Robot (1950):

...it was in 2015 that the Second Mercury Expedition was sent out.  It was exploratory and financed in part by U.S.Robots and in part by Solar Minerals...

In Sinister Barrier (1939) the Vitons, parasitic energy beings who have preyed on humanity since time immemorial, are exposed and defeated in 2015:

"Swift death awaits the first cow that leads a revolt against milking," mused Professor Peder Bjornson.  It was a new slant, and a wicked one, born of dreadful facts...

...Halfway to the door he emitted a brief gasp, stumbled, fell...  The date was May the seventeenth, 2015.

2016   

IN MEMORIAM.  2016 A.D.  NEAR THIS SPOT THE ENEMY OF THE SOL SYSTEM PALMER ELDRITCH WAS SLAIN IN FAIR COMBAT WITH THE CHAMPION OF OUR NINE PLANETS, LEO BULERO OF TERRA.

"Hoopla," Leo ejaculated, impressed despite himself.  He read it again.  And again.  "I wonder," he said, half to himself, "if Palmer's seen this..."

The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldtritch (1964), p.97

2017

10 Feb:  Captain James Ramsay sets out for Pluto to seek for traces of the Pallas [The Mind Parasites (1967)]; see 2007.

From The Shape of Things to Come (1933):
...Three schools, the Unamuno Foundation of Coimbra, the Columbia University of New York, and the Tokio Social College, accounted for more than a third of the World Council in 2017.

2018

2 March:  The Pallas is found, deserted, floating about 2 million miles from Pluto [The Mind Parasites (1967)]

Epic voyage of the spaceship Meteor to find the levium deposit on Oberon [Treasure on Thunder Moon (1942)].

2020

On the first mission to Mars, all the explorers except one are killed by a mysterious vortex in Cydonia.  Months later a second mission follows...  [Mission to Mars (film, 2000)]

2021    

Liar! - the episode of Herbie the mind-reading construct [I, Robot (1950)].

From The Ceres Solution (1981):

The single Aristotle space habitat, completed in 2021, had been built in the form of a cone - a shape which provided environments with different gravities.

Among those benefiting from the conical configuration had been medical researchers, who were grateful for the opportunity to study the effect of low-gravity conditions on patients with certain types of cardiac trouble.  They had been given their own facilities in the 0.3G and 0.5G bands on condition that all patients who were fit enough would accept jobs in the zero-gravity production areas...

From Trapped on Titan (1940):

"What's the name of this blob in the cosmos that we're hanging over?" Chadwick asked.

"Titan," Sands replied.  Then he picked up an interplanetary pilot guide, thumbing through it.  "To give it the way the book does," he announced.  "Titan zoned area, one of the satellites of Saturn.  Climatically uninhabitable, this world was deserted in 2021 when its radium deposits were exhausted."

The chubby pilot closed the book and looked at his companion.

"Hell," Chadwick replied sourly...

From the epilogue to The Black Cloud (1957):  On 17 January 2021 "J.B." is left wondering whether to disseminate the code which will allow resumption of communication with the Cloud.

The Second Sleep (2019) quotes a letter of warning - soon borne out by events - sent to a number of high-placed individuals on 22nd March 2022:

...Three months ago I formed, with a group of like-minded colleagues, a working party to consider what contingency measures should be taken to prepare for a systemic collapse of technical civilisation... 

...We regard our society as having reached a level of sophistication that renders it uniquely vulnerable to total collapse.  The gravity of the threat has increased vastly since 2000, with the transfer of so much economic and social activity to cyberspace...

2023  

...And Vince would have been in on Maury Frauenzimmer's scheme, put by Maury to Sepp von Lessinger in person at a conference of ersatz engineers in New York in 2023, to make use of von Lessinger's time travel experiments to send a psychiatrist back to 1925 to cure Führer Hitler of his paranoia...

The Simulacra (1964), p.44

2024

The generally accepted reality of AD 2024 was one which contained and also was bounded by things like energy crises, the third world war which seemed both inevitable and imminent, attritive strikes, terrorism, failing resources, social decay, famine, and advertising campaigns for children's knife-proof undergarments...

The Ceres Solution (1981).p.33

2025

From chapter 1 of The Moon Maid (1923), describing the launch of the first spaceship to attempt to reach Mars from Earth:

Our estates were taken under trusteeship by the government.  Our farewells were made at an elaborate ball at the White House on December 24, 2025, and on Christmas Day we rose from the landing stage at which The Barsoom had been moored, and amid the blare of bands and the shouting of thousands of our fellow-countrymen we arose majestically into the blue. 

The main part of the action of The Ceres Solution (1981) takes place in 2025.

...She breakfasted early and spent an hour conscientiously absorbing TV newscasts, with special emphasis on her part of the United States and how its inhabitants were responding to their physical, political and cultural environment in the year AD 2025.  The international news was no worse than usual - the smallpox outbreak in the Netherlands was being brought under control; Sarawak had tested a second fusion device in spite of protests from neighbouring countries; preliminary reports were coming in of some kind of major mishap on the Aristotle space colony; and Britain had introduced sugar rationing for a trial period of three months.  In the U.S.A. the steel, coal and dock strikes were close to being settled, but there had been setbacks in the negotiations on the power workers' and the hospital staffs' pay claims; California police had discovered a partially-completed high-megaton bomb in an underground cavern close to the centre of the Palmdale bulge; in Flint, Michigan, the owner of a sporting goods store had killed his wife by tying her to a chair and hurling a total of 381 darts at her.  And in the Annapolis area, because of a westerly wind, temperatures were comparatively high and the radiation count comparatively low.

Gretana took in the news with the practised indifference which preserved her sanity...

A secret society which aims to change past history, so as to prevent World War One, makes use of a predicted temporal anomaly, described in one of Sir Isaac Newton's secret papers, which allows a person at a specified location in Constantinople to be sent back from 2025 to 1914...

...In the early hours of the morning of 31 May 2025, Hugh Stanton left Trinity College Cambridge in a small motorcade which he was surprised to see was travelling with a police escort.  The Companions of Chronos might have been past their prime but they clearly still counted some pretty influential people among their members.

"Best to be safe," McCluskey said.  "Imagine, Isaac Newton arranges a time-precise rendezvous with history across a distance of three hundred years and we miss it because we're stuck in traffic..."

Time and Time Again (2014)

2026

Sabotage of The Barsoom; forced landing in the Moon's interior.  - See The Moon Maid (1923), chapters 1-2.

According to The Martian Chronicles (1950) a trickle of settlers return to Mars from war-torn Earth, and begin to realize that they are the Martians now.

2027

Theft of the Earth:

A great year:  The year of the first landings on the Runaway Planet that had come blundering into the solar system.  Maybe those landings were a mistake - although they were a very great triumph, too; but maybe if it hadn't been for the landings, the Runaway Planet might have run right through the ecliptic and away. 

However, the triumphal mistake was made, and that was the first time a human eye saw a Pyramid.

Shortly after - though not before a radio message was sent - that human winked out forever...  The next thing that happened... astronomers all over the Earth reported and confirmed the astonishing fact that our planet was on the move...   [Wolfbane (1959)]

9 September 2027: Victor Hunt's arrival at Houston - to investigate the Lunarian mystery.  [Inherit the Stars (1977), p.101]

2028

14 October 2028:  Front page feature of the New York Times,

                                     LUNARIAN PLANET LOCATED

                                     Did Nuclear War Destroy Minerva?

...A tenth planet, christened Minerva after the Roman goddess of wisdom, is now known to have existed approximately 250 million miles from the Sun between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter...  [Inherit the Stars (1977), p.104]

2029

20 November 2029:  Victor Hunt's report from Ganymede, setting out the solution to the mystery of the Lunarians/Minervans.     [Inherit the Stars (1977), p.190-200]

The evasion tactics of the modified Nestor 10 as described in Little Lost Robot (1947).

The first lunar base is established, in the crater Ptolemaeus - see Timeliner (1955).

2032  

Mayoralty campaign of Stephen Byerley, who is accused by opponents of being a robot [I, Robot (1950)].

2034 

Discovery of the singularity near Lyon, France, which allows passage back six million years through time [The Many-Coloured Land (1981)].

2035

Hugh Macklin, victim of a deliberate "accident" in a 1959 experiment in "dimensional quadrature", awakes on the Moon in another man's body.  [Timeliner (1955).]

2036

Return of Julian 5th to Earth; birth of Julian 6th.  - See the last page of The Moon Maid (1923).

2041  

The first time-tripper to use the time-portal, discovered in 2034, which gives one-way access to the Pliocene [The Many-Coloured Land (1981)].
..."You spoke of business, Monsieur.  But you should know that many journalists have already written about my husband's work - "
   "I," said Richter with a faint moue of distaste, "am not a journalist.  I am a poet!  And I hope you will consider my proposal most seriously."  He unzipped a side compartment of the pack and removed a leather cardcase, from which he extracted a small blue rectangle.  He held this out to Madame.  "Evidence of my bona fides."
   The blue card was a sight draft on the Bank of Lyon entitling the bearer to collect an extraordinary amount of money...   

2043

[Following the 1989 entry regarding World War Three:]  In 2043 an aerial survey team was commissioned by the Australian government to survey those parts of the world with which there had been no communication [Indoctrinaire (1970, 1979)].  See also 2055.

2044  

The Regions of Earth form their Federation [I, Robot (1950)].  Stephen Byerley, suspected by some to be a robot, becomes the first World Co-Ordinator.

The Northern War - a nuclear war resulting in the eclipse of Northern Hemisphere countries and the rise of Brazil and Australia [The Outward Urge (1959)].

2047

In May, 2047, the latest experiment having revealed only highly interesting but negative results, Malcolm Mackay looked at Burns.

"John, that settled it," he said slowly.  "Something is missing, and we won't get it here in a pair of lifetimes, even long ones.  You know the only place we can find it."

"I suppose you mean the Sun," replied Burns sadly...    [Blindness (1935)]

2049

Malcolm Mackay develops thermlectrium  [Blindness (1935)].

2050

The nations of Earth, having mostly disbanded their armed forces, are living in peace.

...And then in the year 2050 the blow fell.  Lieutenant-Commander Orthis, after twenty-four years upon the moon, returned to Earth with one hundred thousand Kalkars and a thousand Va-gas.  In a thousand great ships they came bearing arms and ammunition and strange, new engines of destruction fashioned by the brilliant mind of the arch villain of the universe. 

The renegade Orthis and his Kalkars (Lunar communists) conquer the Earth.    [The Moon Men (1925), p.190-200]

Launch of the ship Prometheus, headed for the Sun [Blindness (1935)].

The Impossible World [1939] tells us how a product of biological science known as adaptene was able to fit people for life on other worlds:

...Now, in 2050 A.D., bio-conditioned Earthmen were to be found on ten different worlds of the Solar System - Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Saturn and Titan.  Adaptene had burst the former bonds of the narrow range of conditions under which the human body could survive.

2051  

...Some twenty thousand colonists lived there.  They were miners, engineers, laborers, technicians in the food and maintenance centers.  There were three doctors, a scattering of teachers and librarians and similar personnel, a handful of police and administrators.  Exactly fifteen people were employed in brewing, distilling, tavern-running, movie operation, and the other non-essential occupations which men required as they did food and air.
   This was New America, chief city of Venus in 2051 A.D.... 
[The Big Rain (1954)]

2052   

Stephen Byerley is completing his first term as World Co-Ordinator, when Susan Calvin finds out the truth, that the Machines are running the world [I, Robot (1950)].

2053

...They could design the apparatus, and did, in September, three years and one month after lifting off for the final drop to the Sun.  [Blindness (1935) - see 2054]

2054 

...They made it, piece by piece, and tested it in January.  It wasn't winter there; there was no winter.  Only everlasting heat.  And Mackay's eyes were failing rapidly.  His work was over.  Both because he could scarcely work any longer, and because, on January 14, 2054, the energy of the atom was harnessed by man!  The Great Secret was discovered.   [Blindness (1935)]

11th November: the date of a historical document studied centuries later by the historians in Star's Reach - a communication from a General Burkert regarding the evacuation and relocation of Oak Ridge National Laboratory, at a time when messages are being received from another star system, amid crisis on Earth.

2055

Though including some drug-induced time-travel, Now Wait For Last Year (1966) is basically set in the year 2055, in the midst of a losing war against Proxima Centauri.  The Terran leader Gino Molinari has made the disastrous mistake of allying with the humans of Alpha Centauri against the chitinous "reegs" of Proxima, though the latter would prefer to make peace on the basis of live-and-let-live - a move which Earth's ruthless and powerful allies are determined to prevent by force if necessary.

Following the 2043 entry from Indoctrinaire (1970, 1979):  the report of the commission sent by the Australian government, to survey the aftermath of World War Three in those parts of the world which had fallen silent, was made public in 2055.

2056  

...Everything returned.  But totally different.  New. Changed.
   Across from him Don Festenburg leaned back, said, "You're lucky.  But I'd better explain this.  Here.  The calendar."  He pushed a brass object; across the desk Eric saw.  "You've moved slightly over one year ahead."  Eric stared.  Sightlessly.  Ornate inscriptions.  "This is June 17, 2056.  You're one of the happy few the drug affects this way.  Most of them wander off into the past and get bogged down in manufacturing alternate universes; you know, playing God until at last the nerve destruction is too great and they degenerate to random twitches."                                                       [Now Wait For Last Year (1966)]

2059

The Declaration of Megève by the World Council concludes the conference at which the Council abolishes itself, its work successfully completed:
    "The World-State now follows all the subordinate states it swallowed up to extinction; the supreme sovereign government, which conquered and absorbed all minor sovereignties, vanishes from human affairs.  The long, and often blind and misdirected, effort of our race for peace and security has at length succeeded, thanks to this great Council that now retires.  It retires with the applause and gratitude of all mankind.  And now in serenity and security we can survey the property it has redeemed from waste, this planet and its possibilities, our own undeveloped possibilities too, and all the fullness of life that lies before us.  This is the day, this is the hour of sunrise for united manhood.  The Martyrdom of Man is at an end.  From pole to pole now there remains no single human being upon the planet without a fair prospect of self-fulfilment, of hearth, interest and freedom.  There are no slaves any longer; no poor; none doomed by birth to an inferior status; none sentenced to long unhelpful terms of imprisonment; none afflicted in mind or body who are not being helped with all the powers of science and the services of interested and able guardians.  The world is all before us to do with as we will, within the measure of our powers and imaginations.  The struggle for material existence is over.  It has been won.  The need for repressions and disciplines has passed.  The struggle for truth and that indescribable necessity which is beauty begins now, unhampered by any of the imperatives of the lower struggle.  No one now need live less nor be less than his utmost.
   "We must respect the race and each other, but that has been made easy for us by our upbringing...  We must contribute our modicum of work to the satisfaction of the world's needs.  And, for the rest, now we can live..."
                                                                 [The Shape of Things to Come (1933)]

2060

The Young expedition to Uranus - Planet of Doubt (1935).

From The Shape of Things to Come (1933):
...The population total crept back to 1,500 millions in 2060...  


2061

Fowler Barry curled his lips int o a thin smile of satisfaction as he pushed aside the oily, dripping vines and branches of the Venusian jungle and swamp and stepped forth into the clearing where the drug gatherers' shack, a cubical, airtight structure, stood.  This was as he had planned.  They - Pete Slater and Luke Browne had been entered in the Venus Registry of 2061 - should help him to establish his alibi, unwittingly...   [Atom of Death (1940)]

2063

...the quantum nature of gravity was finally established in 2063, and the successful detection of the graviton led directly to an understanding of betaspace and thus to the development of faster-than-light travel...                                                     [Ship of Strangers (1978)]

2065  

   ...Night became day.  He was still in the room at the Caesar Hotel but it was later; he could not tell how much.  Months?  Years?  The room looked the same but probably it always would; it was eternal and static.  He left the room, descended to the lobby, asked for a homeopape at the newsstand next to the reservations desk.  The vendor, a plump old Mexican woman, handed him a Los Angeles daily; he examined it and saw that he had gone ahead ten years.  The date was June 15, 2065...           [Now Wait For Last Year (1966)]
         [See also 2055, 2056]

2067

United States of the World "came into being in 2067 upon the centenary of the Yellow War" [Brigands of the Moon (1930)].

2070

The opening sentences of Brigands of the Moon (1930):

Our ship, the space-flyer, Planetaria, whose home port was Greater New York, carried mail and passenger traffic to and from Venus and Mars.  Of astronomical necessity, our flights were irregular.  The spring of 2070, with both planets close to the Earth, were were making two complete round trips.  We had just arrived in Greater New York, one May evening, from Grebhar, Venus Free State.  With only five hours in port here, were were departing the same night at the zero hour for Ferrok-Shahn, capital of the Martian Union...

2071  

..."Excerpts from Samuel Lann's diary, June 1, 2071:  Today I had another look at the three babies, and there is no doubt that here is an extraordinary mutation...  This is perfection."    [Slan (1940)]

2072

...so the call went out to Earth.  The Uranians had destroyed an Earth Fleet at 0622 Greenwich on April 13, 2072.              [The Fatal Third (1953)]
[See also Being briefed on the inhabitants of Uranus.]

2073  

..."June 7, 2073:   A damn fool journalist wrote an article about the children today.  The ignoramus stated that I had used a machine on their mother..."   [Slan (1940)]

2075

"It was argued by many at the Families' meeting of 2075, the year of the Covenant, that we should reveal ourselves, since civil liberty was firmly re-established.  The majority did not agree at that time..."
                                                                              [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

2076

Destruction of the Nioth-Korghai [The Space Vampires (1976)].

May 2076: Revolt of the lunar colony [The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966)].

2081  

...The ice meteorites ranged in size from ten to a hundred cubic miles; and when they had melted their huge volume of water down on the surface, and into the atmosphere, Venus had oceans and oxygen...  By 2081 A.D. the Institute of General Semantics, just then entering its governmental phase, realized the null-A potentialities of the bountiful planet.  By this time, transported trees and other plants were growing madly...    [The World of Null-A (1948)]

2082  

Wyatt and Carpenter's foolhardy, doomed attempt at a Brightside Crossing of Mercury.

2083

The action of Tidal Moon (1938).

Amherst shook his head.

"That's ironic.  In 2083, two months' old news has to be carried by hipp.  It's like going back to post medievalism."

"It is.  But you know radio is useless in the flood belt of Ganymede..."

2085

Matt Dodson becomes a cadet in the Interplanetary Patrol - Space Cadet (1948).

First permanent colonies established on Mars and Venus by 2085. 
                                                                  [The Three Planeteers (1940)]

The world population reached 2,000 millions again in 2085 [The Shape of Things to Come (1933)].

2087   

Close approach of the star Helios to the Sun; interpenetration of the two solar systems; expedition to the planet Achilles [Fifth Planet (1963)].

2090   

August 8....  "Each of the girls had triplets.  Wonderful.  At this rate of reproduction, the period when chance can destroy them will soon be reduced to an actuarial minimum...  I am continually impressing on the children that their descendants will be the future rulers of the world..."   [Slan (1940)]

One warm October afternoon, in the year 2090, Claus Coman could be seen disembarking from the Moon-Earth ferry, in Twelfth City, Section 7... 
                                                                                 [A Man of Double Deed (1965)]

2093

Gilbert Hamilton.  Born of flatlander parents, in April, 2093, in Topeka, Kansas.  Born with two arms and no sign of wild talents...  [The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976)]

2094

Possible first exploratory visit to Persephone was by Alan Jacob-Mion, in 2094.  Mion's claim has been cast into doubt...   [Protector (1973)]

2095  

Concordat signed between the vugs of Titan and the UN [The Game Players of Titan (1963)].

2096

Mysterious trouble occurs in the duplication of Old Masters.

...Ross Trafford was the senior technician of Public Art Galleries (S.E. Section).  Under him was a team of electronic engineers, skilled, competent and unimaginative.  From his city office he directed operations and dealt with all calls from the area.  The morning of Tuesday, 12th May, 2096, promised to be typical of his routine...

..."An erratic Leonardo.  Unusual.  Probably something quite simple, a weakened coil or a sticking fuse.  Just a little disturbing, though."  It nagged at the back of his mind...

[Rogue Leonardo (1964)]

2100

Implied date - since the Young expedition was "four decades earlier in 2060" - of the Hammond expedition to Uranus: Planet of Doubt (1935).

Julian the 9th born on 1st January 2100 in Chicago.  [The Moon Men (1925), p.18]

2103

Establishment of the Outstation Llywarch Hen on Roseworld [The Star Treasure (1971)].

2104

The Behaviour Control Report for 2104 (2105 is not yet available) records 715 cases of stealing for the whole world.        [The Shape of Things to Come (1933)]

2106 

The alien Sea Statue comes out of stasis in The World of Ptavvs (1966).

2109   

21st March: date of historical document shedding light on the crisis on Earth at that time, and how the project for communication with another star system continues amid socio-political disintegration. 

"...We're going to have to figure out soon how much of an operation we can keep going here without outside help, whether there's a point to doing so, and what if anything we're going to tell the CETI team and the support staff..." 
                                                                            [Star's Reach, p.116]

Miles Rodney works for Administrator Slayton Ford from this year till the crisis of 2136.  [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

2110

March: disastrous return of the Gunderson Europa Expedition in Redemption Cairn (1936) - see 2111.

The main action of The Many-Coloured Land (1981): the year in which the one-way time-route to exile in the Pliocene is taken by the batch of eight trippers whose fortunes are followed in the book.

2111

Jack Sands' adventure on Europa in Redemption Cairn (1936) - the adventure starts in September 2111:

There I sat, Jack Sands, ex-rocket pilot.  Yeah, the same Jack Sands you're thinking of, the one who cracked up the Gunderson Europa expedition trying to land at Young's Field, Long Island, in March, 2110.  Just a year and a half ago!

2112

Conflict between a Terran colonist and native Martians [At the Bottom of a Hole (1966)].

Crisis in Ward T of the US Army Hospital beneath St Albans, N.Y., as victims of combat shock learn to vanish into their own created dimensions of reality [Disappearing Act (1953)].

2113

John Markham, who was trapped and frozen underground in the 'Nine Days Tranquiliser' nuclear holocaust of 1967, is revived to find himself in a culture dominated by androids [The Uncertain Midnight (1958)].

Tests for space virus were negative.  (Since the Ganymede disaster of 2113, spacemen had been highly conscious of the dangers they might be bringing back to Earth.)                                                           [The Space Vampires (1976)]

"At the time of the crisis of 2113 I was an assistant correlation cleark in the Division of Economic Studies, Control Section."  [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

2117

Reflections on a 2117 childhood encounter with Captain Carlsen, discoverer of the huge alien ship dubbed the Stranger [The Space Vampires (1976)].

Funeral of Nelson F Webster (2034-2117).  His son and successor, Jerome A Webster, suffers from agoraphobia - a disability which turns out to have huge consequences  [Huddling Place, the second tale in City (1952)].

According to Vanguard to Neptune (1932):

...To date none of the other satellites of Jupiter had been visited, though the ill-fated De Castro expedition of 2117, which crashed on Jupiter itself somewhere in the region of the famous Red Spot, had intended including Io, Callisto and Europa in its itinerary...

22nd April 2117: the accident which kills asteroid-dweller Cubes Forsyth.  [The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976).]

2119

Thomas Cornwall's voyage to the Moon [The Crucible of Power (1939)]:

Captain Thomas Cornwall was a young ordnance engineer, on leave from the army.  His rocket was the first to attain the velocity of escape - 11.3 km/sec.  His triumphant return, after two weeks on the Moon, won him the world's frantic acclaim.  The feat seemed symbolic of the reawakening of man, after the long night of the Black Century...

2122

First uprising against the Kalkars, led by Julian 9th.  [The Moon Men (1925)]

The enactment of the Freezer Law of 2122 - by which the State confiscates the stored bodies of those who had opted for cryogenic preservation without sufficient funds for continued maintenance - puts many organlegging gangs out of business.  [The Long Arm of Gil Hamilton (1976)]

2123

21st March 2123: kidnapping of Holden and Charlotte Chambers, at the behest of the Anubis organization of organleggers [The Defenceless Dead, in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976)].

2nd November: the Belter, Owen Jennison, is found dead.  (The subsequent investigation implicates the organlegger known as Loren.)  [Death By Ecstasy, inThe Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976)]

2125

The security council passed the second Freezer Bill on February 3, 2125.  Now it would go to the world vote in late March.  The voting public numbered ten billion, of whom perhaps sixty per cent would bother to phone in their votes...
                               [The Defenceless Dead, in The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976)]

Phssthpok the Pak arrives at Sol.  Brennan turns Protector.  [Protector (1973)]

The long-lived Howard Families try the experiment of allowing a small percentage of their membership to reveal their existence, since 

...it had become extremely difficult to counterfeit new identities for the ever-increasing number of us holding public ages incompatible with personal appearance...

                                                                  [Methuselah's Children (1958)]

All of Earth waited for the small black hole to bring it to its end.  It had been discovered by Professor Jerome Hieronymus at the Lunar telescope in 2125 and it was clearly going to make an approach close enough for total tidal destruction...                                                                    [About Nothing (1977)]

2127

Tibet and America, each claiming the Radiant Heat Monopoly, applied for a War Permit for 2127, A.D.

The Universal War Board granted it, stating, of course, the conditions...

[War No. 81-Q (1928)]

2129

Attempt by Garth Hammond's Volcano Steam and Metals Corporation to drill through Earth's crust ends in disaster [The Crucible of Power (1939)]:

...For, after a billion dollars had been spent to sink the great pit forty thousand feet, the bottom of it suddenly split.  Men and refrigerating machines were drowned in flaming lava.  A rain of boiling mud drowned the new city of Hammondspit, Virginia, taking twenty thousand lives.

2130

Birth of Garth Hammond's son Chan, narrator of The Crucible of Power (1939).

2132

Garth Hammond departs for Mars [The Crucible of Power (1939)].

New York City is "destroyed in the final World War of 2132" [Goddess of the Moon (1940)].

Carl Dennell, who was made immortal at the cost of his emotions, now finds that his intellect is no longer keeping pace with the progress of mankind [The Coming of the Ice (1926)]:

...to the intellect, monotony cannot exist: it was one of those emotions I had left behind.  One day, however, in the year 2132, a great discovery was made by a man called Zarentzov.  It had to do with the curvature of space, quite changing the conceptions that we had all followed since Einstein...

2134

Return of Garth Hammond with the Martian secret of power - solidified "photon dust" [The Crucible of Power (1939)].

2136

6th June: the 21st birthday of Miss Octavia Lattery; the day she has been asked to open the letter sent to her from the 20th century...          [Chronoclasm (1953, 1956)]

Public hostility forces the long-lived Howard Families to flee from Earth into interstellar space [Methuselah's Children (1958].

2138

Marriage of Garth Hammond to Doris Wayne, heir to the Marine Mines billions [The Crucible of Power (1939)].

2140  

5 October: birth of Leon Cartwright, future Quizmaster of the Nine Planets.

..."You can't operate this," Moore said quietly.  "This isn't your line.  What are you?  I examined the records.  You were born October 5, 2140, outside the Imperial Hill.  You've lived there all your life; this is the first time you've been on this side of the Earth, let alone on another planet.  You had ten years of nominal schooling in the charity department of the Imperial Hill.  You never excelled in anything..."

[Solar Lottery (1955)]

"The punishment for Wade Trask," said Medellin, "has been adjudicated as death.  Accordingly, your group becomes forthwith responsible for the actions of the said Wade Trask, it being understood that no limitations except those legally permissible can be placed upon the said Wade Trask's movements and activities.  The condemned seditionist, Wade Trask, shall be instructed to report to the converter for execution not later than midnight a week from this day."

"Acknowledged," said the voice of Tilden Arallo, "at 10.30 a.m., August 26, 2140 A.D., on behalf of Group 814."

[The Mind Cage  (1957)]

2142

According to Flight on Titan:

The year 2142, as most people recall, was a disastrous one in the financial world.  It was the year of the collapse of the Planetary Trading Corporation and the year that ushered in the resultant depression.

Tim and Diane Vick therefore resolve to try their luck prospecting for flame-orchids on Titan...

2144

"Space" (the space stations, plus colonies on the Moon and Venus) declares its independence from the dominant Earth nation, Brazil.  [The Outward Urge (1959)]

2143   

...And sure enough, his guess had been lucky: on May 4, 2143, a Bindman named William Rust Lawrence had died, killed in an auto accident in Arizona.  And Pete had become his heir, inherited his holdings and entered his Game-playing group.

[The Game Players of Titan (1963)]

2145

Officially, Boss Kellon was merely executive secretary of the Union of Spacemen, Managers and Engineers.  But Boss, now in 2145, was equivalent to Caesar.  From the unitron converters on Mercury to the lonely mining outposts scattered across the Jovian moons, the Union dominated mankind...   [Breakdown (1942)]

2146

The Solarion, in 2146, returning with her seventh cargo of sunstone, was accosted by a strange vessel in space - a slim red arrow of a ship, unlike the mirror spheres of SPC.  Heliographs flashed a message, signed "Redlance", demanding surrender of the ship and cargo, "in the name of liberty and human right."  [The Crucible of Power (1939)]

 2148

Report reaches Earth that the Sun Station has been lost [The Crucible of Power (1939)]:

The Solarion III, in 2148, safely reached the Sun and returned.  But her holds were empty and she brought appalling news...

2150

By 2150 all the planets from Mercury to Neptune had been colonized [The Three Planeteers (1940)].

daleks-invasion-earth-2150AD

For a treatment of some important events of this mid-22nd-century year see the 1966 film Daleks' Invasion Earth 2150 A.D., based on the 1964 Dr Who serial (in which the invasion occurred in the year 2164 - the figure being later rounded for the film). 

[Note from Zendexor: I never saw the film but I vaguely remember some of the images in the original TV version, though I had forgotten the plot.  According to Wikipedia the Daleks attempt to turn the entire Earth into a spaceship.]

2156

Warning of the approach of an anti-matter world:

It was on January 15, 2156, that the astrophysicist, Dr. James Carter, had the first glimmer of light - literally.  He was working on the new five-hundred-inch reflector of the Mt. McKinley observatory at the time, and noticed a darkening of his photographic plate from the spectrometer focused on Polaris...
                                                                                                           [Minus Planet (1937)]

2157

Margie even wrote about it in her diary.  On the page headed May 17, 2157, she wrote, "Today Tommy found a real book!"            [The Fun They Had (1954)]

The Moon is steered to collide with an anti-matter world that threatens the Earth [Minus Planet (1937)].

2161    Mind-sculptor Barkun Kris re-creates the personality of composer Richard Strauss and imprints it upon Jerom Bosch. 

"...Naturally you'll realize that by this time nothing remains of your body but some bones, which we have not disturbed.  The body you have now was born in our own time and was volunteered for your use..."     [A Work of Art (1956)]

2167

Disappearance of Kennicot Muir and founding of the Society of Thieves [The Paradox Men (1953)].

2170

4 August:  Carew, from the Institute, visits Dr Homer Green, the Invariant.  (See 1943.)

...to tread on rugs, to see chairs covered in cloth with a nap, to see instruments for smoking, to see and hear a primitive radio... above all to see an open fire; all this gave me a sense of unreality, prepared though I was.  Green saw by the fire in a chair, as we almost invariably find him, with a dog at his feet.  He is perhaps the most valuable man in the world...

The peacefully seated man expresses confidence that the invariant-treatment will work on him.

"It does work, Dr Green," I assured him.  "Indefinitely."

"We mustn't be premature," he said.  "After all, a short time - "

"Do you recall the date, Dr Green?" I asked.

"September 11th," he said.  "1943, if you want that, too."

"Dr Green, today is August 4, 2170," I told him earnestly.

The "Misadventure" - a nuclear war which leaves Earth a wreck.
                            [If There Were No Benny Cemoli (1963)]

...For three months now, this Earth-year of 2170, mysterious accidents had been happening to commercial space-ships.  Non-arrival at destination, and then later found by the Interplanetary Patrol, derelicts in space.  Gruesome damn' thing.  A ship unharmed, save that its air was gone...    [Phantom of the Seven Stars (1940)]

2171

from POWER UNLIMITED by Martin Brand, Solar City, Earth, 2171, regarding contra-terrene matter:

...Undismayed by the untouchable stuff, the space engineers have named it familiarly seetee, and they are reaching daringly to grasp it now.  The mightiest force yet known, it can create a new kind of freedom - the freedom of power.  Or, misused, it can crush every human freedom.  That is the problem and the promise all our planets face today.

Seetee Shock (1949, 1950)


2172

The time-retracing Toynbee Twenty-Two crash-lands in the Ohio River near Wheeling on 21st July, five years before its launch. 

On 22nd July a man is found wandering along the river bank,

dazed, almost naked, carrying a leather-bound book with him.  The book bore the gold-stamped legend - T-Twenty-two...

The man joins the Society of Thieves and becomes known as Alar....  [The Paradox Men (1953)]

Exploratory expedition to Persephone, the outermost planet.

...Persephone was reported to have no moons and an atmosphere typical of gas giant worlds...    [Protector (1973)]

2173

Spoken in 2177:

"...Four years ago the Lunar Station began sending me microfilm plates of both celestial hemispheres by the space second.  One of these plates is of particular interest, and I feel that what it shows may have a bearing on the future of civilization.  It should be analysed immediately."   [The Paradox Men (1953)]

2176

28th April:  Will Carewe, believing that he has just taken an immortality drug, reflects...

...Could it be that there would come a day, perhaps only a hundred years in the future, on which he would have to check his diary to remember the colour of Athene's hair?  Without absolute continuance of the personality was there such a thing as immortality?  Or did it simply mean that his deathless body would be inhabited by a series of strangers, each fading imperceptibly into the next as the biological slates were wiped clean? 
                                                                                         [One Million Tomorrows (1970)]

2177

A momentous year.  Bern Haze-Gaunt, the evil Chancellor of America Imperial, is plotting "Operation Finis". 

6 June:  the action of The Paradox Men begins on or just before this date.  Evening: the masked ball in the Imperial Palace...

21 July:  Launch of the transphotic universe-circumnavigating time-retracing history-re-writing Toynbee Twenty-Two [The Paradox Men (1953), p.97] -  a second chance for the human race.

2182

22nd August: birth of Tessa Wendel [Nemesis (1989)].

2183 

"An asteroid a couple of miles in diameter, mainly ice.  The Belt telescopes spotted it fairly early, in... 2183, I think.  It was still outside Jupiter's orbit.  Mahmed was the first man to land on it.  He was also the man who plotted its orbit and found out that it was going to hit Mars."
                                                                                 [Protector (1973)]

2189

First visit to Erebus Valley, Mercury [Where the Nightlife Never Ends].

From Indoctrinaire (1970, 1979):
"...if you can imagine a place existing at two different times, then that is this.  Where we are now is the Planalto of AD 2189.  Where we were somewhere over there," he waved vaguely with his hand, "was in 1989."    

2190

Midshipman Blane was cashiered at 0800 hours on Sarday, Ma 35, 2190, on the parade deck of the ship of the line Tyrant, fifty million tons, on station off Callisto, nine months out of Terra on the Trans-Jovian cruise...     [The Star Treasure (1971)]

Return of spatial engineer Rick Drake to Pallas from Earth [Seetee Ship (1951, 1968)]:

...on a March morning of 2190, aboard the Planetaria.  He had spent four years at Solar City... and now he had come back to the Mandate, with his new degree and his daring dreams and not much else, to build a seetee bedplate.

2196

"Three years ago, in 2196, the results of the Holdane Expedition to the asteroids were published at some length in an official pamphlet by the Society for Interplanetary Research..."  
[fragment of The Master of Destruction]

2197

Beginning of the Venusian invasion and disastrous "Venusoforming" described in The Metamorphosis of Earth (1951).

In the year 2197, the first intimation of a strange peril of world-wide scope and gravity came and passed unrecognized for what it really was in the form of a newspaper dispatch from the Sahara, reporting a sand-storm of unprecedented fury...

2200

Marcius Kemble, Dictator of Mars, is exiled to Pluto.  [Escape from Pluto (1947)]

2203  

The events of Solar Lottery.  To quote the blurb:

"Positions of public power decided by a sophisticated lottery.  Everyone had a chance, could live in hope.  Opium for the people.  One day you too could be boss.  And with it: The Assassination Game, which you could watch on TV.  Would the new man be good enough to avoid his chosen killer?  Survival of the fittest formalised into a game.  Lots of excitement for everyone, keeps them all happily distracted while the Big Five industrial complexes run the world, the solar system, the people, unremarked, unopposed. 

Then in the year 2203 a hitch developed in the system."

2212

...He took out a much-folded paper, opened it with shaking hands, handed it across to Vallant.  It was a map, creased and patched, grimy and oil-splattered.  The legend in the corner read:

   TERRESTRIAL SPACE ARM -
   POLAR PROJECTION.  Sol IX
   March 2212

The old man leaned, pointing.  "See this spot right here?  A river cuts through the mountains - a river of liquid nitrogen.  The gorge is a thousand feet deep - and the falls come thundering down out of the sky like the end of the world.  That's the place, Ame.  They'd kill to get it..."

[The Other Sky (1964)]

2220  

Astronomer Eugenia Insigna discovers the Sun's neighbour star, Nemesis [Nemesis (1989)].

2221

The Jovian moon Io is removed from the British Imperial Protectorate [Revolt on Io (1941)]

2234

..."Kreuther!" said Mallory thoughtfully.  The affair sounded like one of Kreuther's moves.  That power-mad genius, exiled from Earth after the thwarted Lunar Campaign of 2234, was accustomed to strike in just this fashion...       
                                                                                                  [Revolt on Io (1941)]

2235  

The Rifflin expedition heads for the eighth planet [The Vanguard to Neptune (1932)].

2237   

First superluminal flight (15th January).  Meanwhile, on the same day, on Erythro, habitable world in the Nemesis system, Marlene Fisher steps unprotected onto the planetary surface for the first time.  [Nemesis (1989]

2240  

...I don't know how much time passed before I managed to say, "You found it."

Eleen glanced back over her shoulder at me, beaming.  "Yes.  This is everything they'd been able to figure out about the aliens by 2240 - more than two hundred years ago..."    [Star's Reach, p.154]

2246

   "Newsbrief summary."  The artificial voice had an Oxford accent.  "Precis: today, January 12, 2246, oh-nine forty-one, good morning.  Thirty seven persons are picketing the Tijuana City Hall in a legal manner.  Their registered grievance is, summarized in abstract, the expansion of the Extraterrestrial Reserve...."       [Sundiver (1980)]

2250

...the Ceres Mining Company, organized in 2250 for the exploitation of the mineral resources of Ceres, Pallas and Vesta...  [The Stars My Destination (1955), p134]

2251

Cordele, Georgia,

...had been depopulated in 2251 and kept empty for the statutory whole year, which meant that the people now living in it did not exist as far as Metagov was concerned...
                                                                       [Orbitsville Departure (1983)]

2260

"Sort of a shame.  Romantic, kind of.  I mean, leaving just one graveyard untouched during all these centuries.  The other graveyards were cleaned out, what year was it, Jim?"

"About 2260, I think.  Yeah, that was it, 2260, almost a hundred years ago.  But some Salem Committee they got on their high horse and they said, "Look here, let's have just ONE graveyard left, to remind us of the customs of the barbarians..."

[Pillar of Fire (1948)]

2263

Mace Waldron, the famous pilot who saved that Martian liner in 2263...  [Jay Score (1941)]

2270

Jay Score's piloting rescues the Upskadaska City.

You may remember the stunt that the audiopress of 2270 boosted as "McNulty's Miracle Move"?  It's practically a legend of the spaceways.  Afterward, when we'd got safely home, McNulty disclaimed the credit and put it where it rightfully belonged.  The audiopress had a good excuse, as usual.  They said he was the captain, wasn't he?  And his name made the headline alliterative, didn't it?  Seems that there must be a sect of audio-journalists who have to be alliterative to gain salvation.  [Jay Score (1941)]

2278

Colonization of Erebus Valley, Mercury [Where the Nightlife Never Ends].

2293

Disappearance of Orbitsville, the Dyson sphere which had absorbed Earth's attention for two centuries; beginning of a Renaissance on Earth.  [Orbitsville Departure (1983)]

2300

Erebus Valley, Mercury, is "inducted into the Republic" [Where the Nightlife Never Ends].

2301

15 February:  Ben Reich, megalomaniac boss of Monarch Utilities, having wakened screaming from his recurrent dream of The Man With No Face, comes to a decision: he will murder his arch-rival Craye D'Courtney of the D'Courtney Cartel.

It's D'Courtney who's giving me the screams.  Not because I'm afraid of him.  I'm afraid of myself.  Known all along.  Known it deep down inside.  Knowing that once I faced it I'd have to kill that D'Courtney bastard.  It's no face because it's the face of murder...   [The Demolished Man (1953), p9]

2302

...It was a diamond-clear morning - one of a seemingly endless succession of fine mornings in that summer - yet he was a acutely conscious of the date as he moved about the familiar environment of the kitchen.  August 25, 2302.  Only nine years had passed since Orbitsville had departed for another universe, but it had been two whole centuries since an exploration ship had slipped away from the Earth-Moon system heading for unknown space.  Now the Columbus was fully stored and ready to spiral out of Polar Band One to test itself against sun-seeded infinities, and the date would be one for the history books...
                                                                                   [Orbitsville Departure (1983)]

2312

Date of the events in the eponymous novel 2312 (published 2012).

2320   

Interstellar drive invented [Far Centaurus (1944)].

2330

Construction of the Replicator (which of course is immediately used to Replicate itself) brings all former economics to an end.  (This is part of the distant background to the ninth-millennium tale, Flame Lords of Jupiter.)

2332  

The plague known as the Gray Death strikes our planet; the Confederated Nations of Earth throw all their resources into combating it.  However, the situation is saved only by a maverick scientist who organizes the first ever space-voyage, to obtain healing radium salts from the Moon.  [Goddess of the Moon (1940)]

2336

16 September:  Gully Foyle, spaceman, marooned on the wreck of the merchant ship Nomad, sees the approach of what he trusts is a rescue ship.  But the ship, Vorga, passes him by, leaving him to his fate.  This act galvanizes the hitherto dull-witted, unambitious Foyle:

...the stereotype Common Man was no more.  The key turned in the lock of his soul and the door was opened.  What emerged expunged the Common Man for ever.

"You pass me by," he said with slowly mounting fury.  "You leave me rot like dog.  You leave me die, Vorga...  No.  I get out of here, me.  I follow you, VorgaI find you, Vorga.  I pay you back, me.  I rot you.  I kill you, Vorga.  I kill you deadly."

The acid of fury ran through him, eating away the brute patience and sluggishness that had made a cipher of Gully Foyle, precipitating a chain of reactions that would make an infernal machine of Gully Foyle...     [The Stars My Destination (1955), p21]

2340

September: kidnap of Roy Truesdale by the protective Brennan-monster who lurks on the borders of the Solar System [Protector (1973)].

2341

Elroy did not twitch when acrid smoke curled up from the message spool.  He had half expected that.  In any case he had recognized the voice.  His own.  He must have made this tape for... Vandervecken... during the time he couldn't remember.

He spoke to the blackened tape.  "You wouldn't lie to yourself, would you, Roy?"

Under what circumstances?

He got out of the car and walked to the Tourist Office and bought a morning newstape.  His set still worked, though the message spool was a charred lump.  He played the tape for the date.  January 9, 2341...                                     

October: Brennan the Protector discovers the Pak fleet that is headed towards Sol.
November: departure of the Flying Dutchman.  Brennan destroys his former refuge, Kobold.
                                                                                              [Protector (1973)]

2342

May: discovery of the Pak scouts.
July: Roy Truesdale in stasis.  Departure of the ship Protector.   [Protector (1973)}

2348

Return of Hilary Grendon from a five-year space trip, the first space voyage, to find Earth has been enslaved by invaders from Mercury [Slaves of Mercury (1932)]

2371

...The print in the old books had faded centuries ago though much of the lettering was still visible - if there had been any to read it.  But many generations had passed since anyone had had a use for a set of seven-figure logarithms, an atlas of the world, and the score of Sibelius' Seventh Symphony, printed, according to the flyleaf, by H.K.Chu and Sons, at the City of Pekin in the year 2371 A.D.                          [History Lesson (1949)]

2381

...The largest recorded crowd ever was of an estimated two hundred and ten million people who assembled for the event of the Joyous Declaration of the World God Uhuru movement on the Central African plain in A.D. 2381, this number being compressed into a remarkably small area thanks to the ingenious open-plan multi-storey stadia erected for the occasion...
                                                                   [The Problem of Morley's Emission (1978)]

2391

Morton Cargill is brought from 1954 to 2391 by the Inter-Time Society for Psychological Adjustments.....  where he is told he is to be killed as therapy for the descendant of a girl passenger who had died in a car he'd crashed...   [The Universe Maker (1953)]

2430

"...It is in our generation that perfection has been reached, and we want the distinction of having reached it.  Your animals are in the way."

Cranwitz shook his head stubbornly.  "They take up so little room; consume so little energy.  If all were wiped out, you might have room for what?  For twenty-five more human beings?  Twenty-five in fifteen trillion?"

Bunting said, "Twenty-five human beings represent another seventy-five pounds of human brain.  With what measure can you evaluate seventy-five pounds of human brain?"

"But you already have billions of tons of it."

"I know," said Alvarez, "but the different between perfection and not-quite-perfection is that between life and not-quite-life.  We are so close now.  All Earth is prepared to celebrate this year of 2430 A.D.  This is the year when the computer tells us that the planet is full at last..."

[2430 A.D. (1970)]

2432

Yawning, Mr. Eric Stokes-Harding stood before the great open window, staring out.  Below him was a wide, park-like space, green with emerald lawns, and bright with flowering plants.  Two hundred yards across it rose an immense pyramidal building - an artistic structure, gleaming with white marble and bright metal, striped with the verdure of terraced roof-gardens, its slender peak rising to help support the gray, steel-ribbed glass roof above.  Beyond, the park stretched away in illimitable vistas, broken with the graceful columned buildings that held up the great glass roof.

Above the glass, over this New York of 2432 A.D., a freezing blizzard was sweeping.  But small concern was that to the lightly clad man at the window, who was inhaling deeply the fragrant air from the plants below - air kept, winter and summer, exactly at 20 degrees C...                   [The Cosmic Express (1930)]

Expedition of the spaceship Goddard to Pluto [Expedition to Pluto (1939)].

2440

The narrator of L'An 2440 (1771) wakes up in Paris in this year and finds himself in a pacifist, egalitarian utopia under a constitutional monarchy.

2450   

...All old Dr Full knew was that she was peering at the neck of the forceps and then turned white.  Very carefully, she placed the half of the forceps back in its loop of cloth and then replaced the retractor and the speculum.  "Well?" he asked.  "What did you see?"

"'Made in U.S.A.,'" she quoted hoarsely.  "'Patent applied for July 2450'." 

[The Little Black Bag (1950)]

2461

Passage of the Stability of the Social Order Act...

"Here we are - Section 64a - relating to the threat to social and economic stability caused by excessive time immigration from the belligerent centuries.  Immigration by time, whether by Highway J, sub-dimensional transit, pathological hibernation, or whatever method, is an offense under the Stability of the Social Order Act of 2461, for which the maximum penalty is compulsory euthanasia..."

[Highway J (1953)]

2470

After the Edict of this year, "Stappers be more severe...  Before they doed pardon some irregularities, but now none..."            [Barrier (1942)]

The first independence movements among the colonized planets started in 2470 [The Three Planeteers (1940)].

2473

The first difficulty was with language.
   That is only to be expected when you jump five hundred years; but it is none the less perplexing to have your first casual query of: "What city is this?" answered by the sentence: "Stappers will get you.  Or be you Slanduch?"
                                                                                                    [Barrier (1942)]

2479

Date of the Official Rule Book for the Annual Terran-Martian Football Game [Rule 18 (1938)]:

"Each player on the respective teams must be able to present documentary evidence that he is of pure blood of the planet upon whose team he plays for an unbroken span of at least ten generations.  Verification of the aforesaid documentary evidence and approval of the players upon this point shall be the duty of the Interplanetary Athletic Control Board..."

2481

Outbreak of the White-Yellow War [Seeker of Tomorrow (1937)].

2486

From Seeker of Tomorrow (1937):  "...Move those feet of yours a little more and your tongue a little less.  And, just in case you want to keep up the play, Methuselah, may I anticipate a question by informing you that this is the year of disgrace 2486?"

2490   

End of the 2481-90 War...

...brought to an end by a militant organization of women who, first of all, refused to bear any more children, then deserted the munitions factories, causing both sides to withdraw great numbers of men to replace them, and, finally, took up arms and assassinated the individuals whom they considered to be the key men of the war.  The conflict was the direct cause of the world matriarchy that held sway for the next three thousand years...     [Seeker of Tomorrow (1937)]

2495

Manufacture of "Man-hunter, model eleven" by the Sixth Reich - the machine long afterwards encountered by Carlotta vom Acht.  The inscription traced on its carapace:

WAFFENAMT DES SECHSTEN DEUTSCHEN REICHES
BURG EISENHOWER, A.D.2495
MENSCHENJAGER MARK ELF

                    [Mark Elf (1957)]

2500

The Fourth World War started in the year 2500... with the United States against the Mongol hordes, who had conquered all of Earth except this country.  In their onward sweep of conquest, the yellow legions had seized the interplanetary colonies of all nations except Space Base 10, a U.S. possession...  The Asiatic hordes are being led by Kama Khan, a direct descendant of his famous forerunner, Genghiz Khan...  [Suicide Squadrons of Space (1940)]

2504

"Chris Barton, war correspondent for Interplanetary Press, the Sexton Syndicate. Wherever he goes, it means trouble."

Chris Barton smiled—bird of ill-omen, vulture of pain. Beyond the dome of pearly glass, on the other side of Venus, lay the swamp where he had left his boyish illusions, covering the Leng campaigns. Out beyond the steamy canopy of clouds was Mars, where he had stood by a tele-transmitter until it was blown up under him, covering the Martian World War of 2504...

[Interplanetary Reporter (1941)]

2505  

"Thousands of you coming here.  From where?"

"From the future, of course.  Time travel wasn't developed until C/H 127.  That's... oh say, A.D. 2505 by your chronology..."
                                                                                
[Hobson's Choice (1952)]

2507  

...Then came the fabulous "sea-rush" of 2507, brought about by the simultaneous development of two inventions...  [Waters of Wrath (1940)]

2511

...The space liner I had seen burning in A.D. 2511 was the only ship ever lost on the Earth-Centauri line...  [Far Centaurus (1944)]

2518

I talked with the mind of...  the Australian physicist Nevel Kingston-Brown, who will die in A.D. 2,518...  [TheShadow Out of Time (1936)]

2560  

Attack on Venus by interstellar invaders. 

...Population of Venus as of 2560 A.D. - 119,000,038 males, 120,143,280 females, the book said...    [The World of Null-A (1948)]

2567

"...C/H 127.  That's... oh say, A.D. 2505 your chronology.  We didn't set up our chain of stations until C/H 189."                                      [Hobson's Choice (1952)]

2654 

...I was amused on my last day by a question asked by a ten-year-old boy, the son of one of the supervisors.  We stood on a rampart overlooking one of the vast production pits, several hundred feet deep and miles across...

The little boy looked with awe at the scene, then turned his face upward, demanding, "What are we going to do when this hole gets so big that it takes up the whole world?"

We laughed...                                                    [The Dwindling Sphere (1940)]

2675    

....My part in repelling the attempted Martian invasion of Earth in the years 2675-77 was a limited one...

...On April 1st, 2675, war came in earnest, as dreadful as it was unexpected. 

So suddenly were the raiders upon us that we knew it not.  They struck Earth effectively in three places.  Steel mills in Labrador, built to accommodate the large quantities of ore mined in the Republic of Greenland, were blown to bits in the night by roving bombs...

[When Planets Clashed (1931)]

2677   

End of the Martian invasion of Earth which began in 2675 (q.v.).

2732  

16th September:  the incident on the Sun described by the Neutron Rig Operator in Incandescence (2017).

2821  

22nd October:  Archiving of the story of Star's Reach into the central archive of the Guild of Rememberers. 

2830

...the case of Laird Graynon, Police Inspector, 900th Sector Station, New York City, who on July 7, A.D.2830, was falsely accused of accepting bribes, and de-energised.

SOLUTION: Obtained the retirement of Inspector Graynon two months before the date given in the charge.  He retired to his farm, and henceforth exerted the very minimum of influence on the larger scene of existence...  [>>2874]  [The Search (1943)]

2852   

The year from which the vessel Segomay 8 is snatched forward in time [The Winged Man (1944)].

2874

[continued from 2830]  ...He lived in this probability world of his own until his death in 2874...  [The Search (1943)]

2896   

"...It almost happened on Earth once... back in 2896.  The Earth was almost wiped out when one man yearned for power and used biological warfare in its most hideous form.  He knew what the result would be, but that didn't stop him..."     [Cosmic Engineers (1939, 1950)]

2951   

Persian expedition under Prince Khan-Li discovers the ruins of New York City and of Washington, D.C. 

...Turning suddenly upon me with a look of triumph, he exclaimed:

"It is ours!"

"What is ours?" I asked.

"The knowledge we sought"; and he pointed to the inscription:

NEW YORK STOCK EXC...

                                                                                   [The Last American (1889)]

2952  

...That year had seen the splitting of the eight independent inhabited worlds of the Solar System into two hostile alliances. The great and powerful League of Cold Worlds had been formed by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, under a ruthless, ambitious dictator. Feeling themselves menaced, Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars had formed the Inner Alliance. The Alliance had sent out many spies to gain information of the League's threatening plans, but nearly all of them had rapidly been detected and executed.
   Then John Thorn, captain in the Earth Navy, had conceived his patriotic plan. He and two friends, Sual Av, Venusian engineer, and Gunner Welk, Mercurian adventurer, would go forth into the underworld of the system as outlaws...             [The Three Planeteers (1940)]

2956

John Thorn's expedition to Erebus, the mysterious Tenth Planet, to save the System from the League of Cold Worlds [The Three Planeteers (1940)].

2975   

D'Ormand sets off on his momentous time voyage [Ship of Darkness (1948)].

3039  

Legislation breaks up the great sea ranches [Waters of Wrath (1940)].

3040  

Gulf Stream open to public claim [Waters of Wrath (1940)].

3042   

Sudden raw materials shortage -

...Green’s fingers riffled the sheaf of teletyped flimsies.
“This is what I’ve got to tell you. Here are the latest reports from our
mines in the Andes and from the Moon. We’re faced with a drastic raw
materials shortage. Our supply of Uradonite is giving out.”
Uradonite. Nobody had to tell Chick Evans and me what that would mean.
The whole space-flying industry was dependent upon the volatile-active
element Z-470. Nullo-grav units had made vessels weightless. But that
could not provide propulsion. Then came the Mansfield cyclotronic
engine, a power unit by which the immensely heavy atoms of Z-470 were
broken down into electronic streams, the rocket-streams by which all
space-flyers are propelled...

An expedition is therefore quite rightly sent to Neptune...  [The Wings of Icarus (1943)]

3048

Ares Sen Kenlin's trip on a space-liner from Earth to Mars takes 5 days.  [Twilight (1934)]

3057

The Martians suddenly threaten Earth with a "Photo-Atomic Ray", which makes it imperative to send an expedition to Saturn in search of a substance called "tridium" which may neutralise the Ray.

...The Earth, in this year of grace 3057, was a wonderful place to live in, and Copia was the political and cultural center of the Earth.  For nine hundred years now, the peoples of the Earth had lived at peace with one another as members of a single integrated community...  No longer did region war against region, or group against group, or class against class...
                                                                                         [Cave-Dwellers of Saturn (1939)]

3059

Ares Sen Kenlin of Neva'th City begins his voyage in time.  (See 1932.)  [Twilight (1934)]

3145

The oddity of an ageing G4 yellow moving about a common axis with a white supergiant no more than eleven million years old had already engaged the interest of the cosmologists attached to the Chinese / American fleet.  The spectroanalysis spurred them into active investigation.

The supposedly Earth-like planet of the distant binary system was filed under the appellation G4PBx/4582-4-3.  Symbols were despatched on their lengthy journey through the dust clouds to Earth.

Berthed inside the flagship of the fleet, then cruising the outer fringes of the Ophiuchus dust clouds, was an automated colonizing ship.  The ship was programmed and despatched to G4PBx/4582-4-3.  The year was 3415.                                                                              [Helliconia Winter (1985)]

3150

The last of the Sutton family moves out of their area of Wisconsin.  [Time And Again, p.185]

3174

The monks of the order of St Leibowitz succeed in reconstructing electric light [A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)].

3368  

...He had fought in the deadly little wars of the Moons of Jupiter for years, then the Universal Debacle of 3368, after that the Martian Revolution...

[The Red Witch of Mercury (1945)]

3564

The "Fostering of Ooranye" - when the inhabited Uranus of Uranian Gleams (2015) surfaces in this continuum.  The Fostering is defined as

the one successful example in history of "reality engineering"; the action taken, and the process which took place, on 10th July A.D.3564, by which the gas giant planet Uranus became, and now always has been, more fully itself as the ice-giant planet Ooranye.  By analogy the Fostering has been likened to the switching of points on a railway after a train has gone past: so that, if the train were to go into reverse, it would go back along a different track.  In other words, a "new" past was grafted onto Uranus...  Meanwhile the un-Fostered reality survives in one remaining clue: the "U" in the adjective "Uranian".

Note: the Fostering appears to have happened at two different dates; see 4160.  Such an event can hardly have two stages; so either there is an inconsistency, or we may take it that cause-and-effect from the 4160 event cascaded backwards and triggered the 3564 event.  I reckon the latter is right; it's what the Earth historian seems to be saying.

3600

When Earth's colonizing starship entered the Freyr-Batalix system in 3600 A.D., it established a base on Aganip, the inner planet closest to Helliconia.  On Aganip, 512 colonists were landed.  They had been hatched aboard the starship during the final years of its voyage...

[Helloconia Summer (1983), p.331]

3735

...the Motu Proprio of Pope Celestine the Eighth...  [A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)]

3749

...the confirming document of Anno Domini 3749, Quo peregrinatur grex, pastor secum...  [A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)]

3756

The "Casu belli nunc remoto" of Pope Paul.  [A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)]

3781

Nuclear war again, and the departure of the monks of the order of St Leibowitz for Alpha Centauri.                [A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959)]

4160

The Second Great Fleet reaches Arclour, the Starward Pole of Uranus.  [Calculated from data in Uranian Gleams (2015) and www.ooranye.com.]  The Final Era begins.  [See also Uranian Thule (2018)]

The historian says:

Everybody knows the bare outline of the events which ushered in our present era; how the Second Great Fleet did succeed in reaching Arclour and its ultimate sivvan, and how that discovery retro-triggered our retro-Fostering of Ooranye, that is to say, the grafting of Ooranye's true history onto the history of our solar system. 

4338

Russia and China unite their efforts to prevent Earth's collision with another planet [The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters (1835)].

4901

...it was in 4901 that nuclear war broke out between the planets... after a statesman on Earth made the mistake of using the old derogatory term "immigrants" about the inhabitants of Mars...  Mars was silenced for ever...  Earth was hit by no more than twelve 10,000 megaton bombs.  It was enough...  [Helliconia Winter (1985)]

5000

I talked with the mind of Yiang-Li, a philosopher from the cruel empire of Tsan-Chan, which is to come in A.D. 5000...  [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

...The Year 5000.  He had become one of the Kotolies.  The Kotolies, a strange, shy little animal native to Mercury, had been brought back to Earth in the fortieth century and crossbred with dogs.  The new hybrid, a domesticated pet, could speak and think the language of Earth, while still retaining the lore of Mercury.

English had long formed the universal speech, but the white and coloured races had both disappeared...  A blend, a merging, an amalgamation of the old stocks, the world-wide type now stood nearly seven feet tall, deeply golden of skin, richly varied in the coloration of hair and eyes...     [Finality Unlimited (1936)]

From The Man Who Awoke (1933):

"...Do you pretend to come from that shameful scene?"

"That is precisely the sort of thing we used to do," replied Winters, "although we did not call it by the same set of names."  He could barely repress his elation.  There could no longer be the slightest doubt of it - he was alive in the year 5000!  His clock had been accurate!

The Forester's face was growing red.  "Timberfall!  You have been amusing long enough - now tell me the truth:  Where is your orig?"

5976

Catherine Martin is awarded her diploma by the College of Science, Alkatoon, Mars [Cosmic Engineers (1939, 1950), p.18]

5980

Jovian forces driven back to Jupiter; end of Jupiter's inconclusive war against Earth and Mars.    [Cosmic Engineers (1939, 1950), p.27]

5998

(Class-room lecture given by the Most Honorable Erru Saggus, Professor of Hamurriquanean Archaeology at the World-University of Toshtush, on the 365th day of the year 5998:)

Males, females, androgynes and neuters of the class in archaeology, you have learned, from my previous lectures, all that is known or inferred concerning the crudely realistic art and literature of the ancient Hamurriquanes.  With some difficulty, owing to the fragmentary nature of the extant remains, I have reconstructed for you their bizarre and hideous buildings, their rude mechanisms...

[The Great God Awto (1940)]

6344

...By the year 6344, living forms were again in moderate abundance.  The human population took a solemn vow that they would hold all possessions in common, declaring that not only life but its freedom was sacred... [Helliconia Winter (1985)]

6371

I saw the first of the strange creatures who appeared among us in the year 6371, men who were later known to be from the planet Venus.  But they were repulsed, for they were savages compared with the Earthmen, although they were about equal to the people of my own century, 1900...  [The Coming of the Ice (1926)]

6842  

The year from which Robairst is snatched forward in time [The Winged Man (1944)].

6948

Catherine Martin is revived from suspended animation  [Cosmic Engineers (1939, 1950), p.20]

7301

Morton Cargill is brought forward in time from 2391 to 7301, to Merlic, capital of Merlica.

"...What the Shadows started in the twenty-second or twenty-third century had more implications than they realized.  A civilization which would not normally have existed came into partial existence as a result of their work, and it has never quite become real.  See that city down there - " He motioned at the mist below - "It's not really there yet.  If you were to go down into it, you would find yourself coming presently to what is literally the edge of the world..." 
                                                                                 [The Universe Maker (1953)]

7877

...They kept their records, they transmitted a constant stream of information back to Earth; present transmissions could be expected to arrive there in the year 7877.  The intricacies of the Helliconian biosphere and its response to change throughout the Great Year could be understood only when at least two complete cycles had been studied...
                                                                                         [Helliconia Summer (1983)]

7990

Return of Asher Sutton to Earth from his mission to 61 Cygni.  [Time And Again (1951) - the book depicts an interstellar empire but the action takes place in the Solar System and is relevant to the OSS in its portrayal of Earth and asteroids.]

"According to the revision of the year 7990," said the robot, "arrived at by convention, any male human under the age of one hundred, sound in mind and body, and unhampered by religious bonds or belief, which are subject to a court of inquiry, must fight a duel whenever challenged."  [p.28]

...War, the man had said.  A war in time...

It would load the personnel of the Justice Department of the year 7990 with spies and fifth columnists and saboteurs.  And it would do that thing so cleverly one could never find the spies.

But, as in an ordinary, honest war, there would be strategic points.  As in chess, there would be one key square.

Sutton was that square...    [p.126-7]

8003   

An advance in time-travel research.

"You don't know?" asked Case.  "Why, it was a man in your own time.  A man who is living at this very moment..."

"Case," said Pringle, "this is 7990.  Michaelson really did very little with it until 8003."

[Time and Again (1951), p.118]

8054

   ...In 8054 A.D. history repeated itself - as it always does.  The First Galactic Empire was greaking up.  Dictators, Emperors, Consolidators wrested the rulership of their own or kindred solar systems from Central Control.  Space pirates raised flags and recruited fleets to gorge on spoil plundered from this wreckage.  It was a time in which only the ruthless could flourish...                                                                                                                          [The Last Planet (1953)]

8300

It was the last day of summer in the last year of the eighty-third century A.D.

Humming to itself high in the stratosphere, a vane carried J. Smithlao, psychodynamician, over the 139th sector of Ing Land...

[All the World's Tears (1957)]

8323

19th May: Resken 905 is summoned by the Flame Lords of Jupiter.

8386    

...Sutton sat easily and picked up the wrench.  He weighed it in his hand.  Blood, he thought, talking to the wrench.  You'll have blood upon one end before the day is out.

"Tell me," said Dean.  "Now that you're here, what do you plan to do?"

"Easy," said Sutton.  "You're going to talk to me.  You're going to tell me something I need to know."

"Gladly," Dean agreed.

"You said you came from the eighty-fourth.  What year?"

"Eighty-three eighty-six," said Dean.  "But if I were you, I'd go up a little ways.  You'd find more to interest you."

"But you figure I'll never get even so far as that," said Sutton...

[Time and Again (1951), p.170]

10,402

Del Two-Forty A, time traveller, sets off forward in time - many millennia later he will meet a traveller from 1951, in a far future world.  [Wanderers of Time (1933)]

12,000   

Lord Clane Linn's archaeological researches on Venus...

...His own estimate of the time that had gone by since the great war was of the order of 8,000 years.  He had enough data from other pits concerning the calendar system of the ancients to guess that by their reckoning, present-day Linn was existing in 12,000 A.D.     [Empire of the Atom (1956)]

12,455

...in the year 12,455, a group of star-systems near Polaris complained that Earth was too remote to appreciate their problems, and they set up an independent kingdom [The Star Kings (1949)].

13,582

...That golden shape on the golden steps shook and fluttered like a bird gone mad - like a bird imbued with an intellect and a soul, and, nevertheless, driven mad by ecstasies and terrors beyond human understanding.  A thousand worlds watched. 

Had the ancient calendar continued, this would have been A.D. 13,582.  After defeat, after disappointment, after ruin and reconstruction, mankind had leaped among the stars.

Out of the shock of meeting inhuman art, of confronting non-human dances, mankind had made a superb esthetic effort and had leaped upon the stage of all the worlds.

The golden steps reeled.  Some eyes that watched had retinas.  Some had crystalline cones.  Yet all eyes were fixed upon the golden shape which interpreted "The Glory and Affirmation of Man" in the Inter-World Dance Festival of what might have been A.D. 13,582....

[No, No, Not Rogov! (1959)]

15,862   

...it only made matters worse when someone in the computing section worked out the future history of our errant freighter.  You see, nothing is ever really lost in space.  Once you've calculated its orbit, you know where it is until the end of eternity.  As we watched our lounge, our library, our games, our mail receding to the far horizons of the solar system, we knew that it would all come back one day, in perfect condition.  If we have a ship standing by it will be easy to intercept it the second time it comes round the sun - quite early in the spring of the year A.D. 15,862.    [Special Delivery (1957)]

16,000

I talked with the mind of Nug-Soth, a magician of the dark conquerors of A.D. 16,000...  [The Shadow Out of Time (1936)]

21,000  

The Earth's lands turn into soft mud and become uninhabitable [The Winged Man (1944)].

24,999   

The US nuclear submarine Sea Serpent arrives in this year, having been snatched from the 20th century [The Winged Man (1944)].

27,346

Start-date of "The Empire of Lyceus II" as reported by Possessor Kingston Craig in the Palace of Eternity [The Search (1943)].

27,378

End-date of the Empire of Lyceus II, A.D.27,346-27,378 [The Search (1943)].

29,940

28th or 29th March 29,940: starting point for the time-sortie of The Machine-Man of Ardathia (1927).

"...If I am not mistaken in my calculations, you are thirty thousand years in the past.  What date is this?"

"June 5th, 1939," I replied, feebly.  The creature went through some contortions, sorted a few metal tubes with its hands, and then announced in its metallic voice:

"Computed in terms of your method of reckoning, I have travelled back through time exactly twenty-eight thousand years, nine months, three weeks, two days, seven hours, and a certain number of minutes and seconds which it is useless for me to enumerate exactly."

33,885   

From Seeker of Tomorrow (1937), regarding the cataclysmic events of 33,885 A.D:

...The Invader, we were informed, was a planet about twice the size of Jupiter, which had come through interstellar space, cleaved a path through the solar system and vanished into the cosmos.  It passed between the orbits of Mars and the asteroid belt, its influence upsetting the normal balance of half the system, making the paths of the asteroids, Mars and Earth much more eccentric, capturing and taking with it two members of the Trojans group of asteroids... 

34,656

From Seeker of Tomorrow (1937):

'...I rubbed my eyes and looked again.  Standing beside the bed, his face expressive of kindly solicitude, was a bald-headed man garbed in rompers of brilliant hue....

'"You are within my house situated in the city of Leamore," he answered in a pleasantly modulated voice, "and the year is 772 by the new reckoning, or 34656 by the old.  You have leaped a chasm of time representing about thirty-two thousand years!"

39,000

By 39,000 the kingdoms of Lyra, Cygnus, and the Baronies of the great Hercules Cluster had declared independence from the Mid-Galactic Empire [The Star Kings (1949)].

62,339

For convenience the government of the Mid-Galactic Empire is shifted from Earth to a world of Canopus [The Star Kings (1949)].

129,411

The Mid-Galactic Empire takes the lead of the star-kingdoms when the galaxy is suddenly invaded by alien and powerful creatures from the Magellanic [The Star Kings (1949)].

202,115

John Gordon, of 20th century Earth, accepts a mind-swap with Zarth Arn, prince of the Mid-Galactic Empire [The Star Kings (1949)].

500,000  

...The year 500,000.  Man had disappeared from the planet Earth, and no longer occupied a position anywhere in the evolution of the universe.  Yet many traces of him remained, and his influence persisted... 

...interplanetary wars had weakened the race...  Man survived on Saturn only through hybrid amalgamation with the conquerors...  [Finality Unlimited (1936)]

800,768   

...He must get a little more power out of the motor, or they would crash to their deaths in a few minutes!  A fine ending for their daring dash to Jupiter - the first space flight since the great comet swarm of 800,768 A.D.  [The Metal Moon (1932)]

802,701

The year the Time Traveller emerged into a far-future England divided between the Eloi and the Morlocks - as narrated in The Time Machine (1895).

1,000,000,000  

...The solar system had altered profoundly.  The tidal drag had brought the moon and Earth together millions of years before, with a collision that made them fuse, flame, and create a new star.  The star circled around the old, dying sun which, as it cooled and solidified under the light of the new star, developed its first species of life-forms, simple forms radically different from the beginnings upon the former planet Earth.  Pluto had been torn away from the system by a wandering star.

He was a nitrogenised metallic spore, clinging to the peak of a jagged, titanic range of mountains fifty miles high, composed of volcanic magma, and overhanging an acid sea.  He was the life primeval, from which in billions of years of later time would arise the deathless, indestructible, purely intellectual and mathematical metallic beings who would shape the destiny of the cosmos for the inheritance of still more complex life-forms of still later trillions of years of ultra-time...   [Finality Unlimited (1936)]


Brian Aldiss, "All the World's Tears" (Nebula Science Fiction 21 (1957), collected in The Canopy of Time (1959); Helliconia Summer (1983); Helliconia Winter (1985); Poul Anderson, "The Big Rain" (Astounding, October 1954); The Corridors of Time (1965); Isaac Asimov, "Trends" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939); I, Robot (1950) including "Little Lost Robot" (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1947); "The Fun They Had" (Fantasy and Science Fiction, February 1954); "Franchise" (If, August 1955); "2430 A.D." (IBM Magazine, October 1970); "About Nothing" (Asimov's SF Magazine, Summer 1977); Nemesis (1989); Arthur K Barnes, "Waters of Wrath" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1940); Alfred Bester, The Demolished Man (1953); The Stars My Destination (1955); "Hobson's Choice" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, August 1952); "Disappearing Act" (Star Science Fiction Stories No. 2 (1953)); Eando Binder, "The Impossible World" (Startling Stories, March 1939); "One Thousand Miles Below" (Planet Stories, Winter 1940); James Blish, "Bridge" (Astounding, February 1952); "A Work of Art" (Science Fiction Stories, July 1956); Anthony Boucher, "Barrier" (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1942); Leigh Brackett, "Interplanetary Reporter" (Startling Stories, May 1941); Ray Bradbury, "Pillar of Fire" (Planet Stories, Summer 1948); The Martian Chronicles (1950); David Brin, Sundiver (1980); Edgar Rice Burroughs, A Princess of Mars (1912, 1917); The Moon Maid (1923); The Moon Men (1925); John Baxter, "Takeover Bid" in New Writings in SF-5 ed. John Carnell (1965); Barrington J Bayley, "The Problem of Morley's Emission" (1978) in The Knights of the Limits (2001); John W Campbell, "Twilight" (Astounding Stories, November 1934); "Blindness" (Astounding Stories, March 1935); Nelson S Bond, "Revolt on Io" (Planet Stories, Spring 1941); The Moon is Hell (1951); Captain Future magazine background article "Eros" (Spring 1942); Bruce Carter (pen name of Richard Hough), The Perilous Descent (1952); Robert W Chambers, The King in Yellow (1895); John D Clark, "Minus Planet" (Astounding Stories, April 1937);  Arthur C Clarke, Prelude to Space (1947, 1951); "History Lesson" (Startling Stories, May 1949); "The Lion of Comarre" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1949); "The Sentinel" (10 Story Fantasy, Spring 1951); The Challenge of the Spaceship (1958); A Fall of Moondust (1961); 2001 - A Space Odyssey (book and film both 1968); "Special Delivery", in "The Other Side of the Sky" (series of linked tales published in the Evening Standard, 1957); "Transit of Earth" (Playboy, January 1971); "Dial F for Frankenstein" in The Wind From the Sun (1972); "Trouble with Time" (Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, July 1960, as "Crime on Mars"); Edmund Cooper, The Overman Culture (1971); The Uncertain Midnight (1958); Ray Cummings, Brigands of the Moon (serialized in Astounding, 1930; published in book form, 1931); "Phantom of the Seven Stars" (Planet Stories, Winter 1940); "The Wings of Icarus" (Startling Stories, June 1943); Allan Danzig, "The Great Nebraska Sea" (Galaxy, August 1963); Leonard Daventry, A Man of Double Deed (1965); Brian de Palma (director), Mission to Mars (film, 2000); Philip K Dick, Solar Lottery (1955); The World Jones Made (1956);Time Out of Joint (1959);The Game Players of Titan (1963); "If There Were No Benny Cemoli" (Galaxy, December 1963); Martian Time-Slip (1964); The Simulacra (1964); The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldtrith (1964); Now Wait For Last Year (1966); Ben Elton, Time and Time Again (2014); Francis Flagg, "The Machine-Man of Ardathia" (Amazing Stories, November 1927); Will Garth, "The Bloodless Peril" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1937); Robert Gibson, Uranian Gleams (2015), "Uranian Thule" in the anthology Vintage Worlds (2018); Rex Gordon, No Man Friday (1956); John Michael Greer, Star's Reach (2014); Edmond Hamilton, "Evans of the Earth-Guard" (Air Wonder Stories, April 1930); "The Universe Wreckers" (Amazing Stories, May - July 1930); "The Man Who Saw the Future" (Amazing Stories, October 1930); "The Three Planeteers" (Startling Stories, January 1940); Treasure on Thunder Moon (1942, reissued 2013); The Star Kings (1949); Captain Future and the Space Emperor (1939, 1967); Captain Future's Challenge (1940, 1967);Charles L Harness, The Paradox Men (1953); Robert Harris, The Second Sleep (2019); William Hawkins, "The Dwindling Sphere" (Astounding Science Fiction, March 1940); Robert A Heinlein, Space Cadet (1948); The Man Who Sold the Moon (written 1949, published 1951); "The Long Watch" (American Legion Magazine, December 1949); Farmer in the Sky (1950); The Puppet Masters (1951); Methuselah's Children (1958); Starship Troopers (1960); The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966); Fred Hoyle, The Black Cloud (1957); Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, Fifth Planet (1963); Dylan T Jeninga, "Where the Nightlife Never Ends"; Damon Knight, "Ticket to Anywhere" (Galaxy, April 1952); "Stranger Station" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, December 1956); C M Kornbluth, "The Little Black Bag" (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1950); "Theory of Rocketry" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1958); G L Lack, "Rogue Leonardo" in New Writings in SF - 2, ed. John Carnell (1964); Keith Laumer, A Trace of Memory (1963); The House in November (1970); "The Other Sky" (Amazing Stories, December 1964); The Star Treasure (1971); Murray Leinster, "Politics" (Amazing Stories, June 1932); "The Power" (Astounding Science Fiction, September 1945); Lilith Lorraine, "Into the 28th Century" (Science Wonder Stories, Winter 1930); H P Lovecraft, "Beyond the Wall of Sleep" (written 1919; Weird Tales, March 1938); "The Call of Cthulhu" (Weird Tales, February 1928);  "The Whisperer in Darkness" (Weird Tales, August 1931); "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" (written 1931, first published as booklet 1936); "The Shadow Out of Time" (Astounding Stories, June 1936); Emmett McDowell, "The Red Witch of Mercury" (Planet Stories, Summer 1945); Charles Eric Maine, Crisis 2000 (1959); "Highway J" (Planet Stories, November 1953; just after appearing in Authentic SF, also November 1953, as "Highway i"); Timeliner (1955); The Man Who Owned the World (1961); Laurence Manning, "The Man Who Awoke" (Wonder Stories, March 1933); Julian May, The Many-Coloured Land (1981); Louis-Sébastien Mercier, L'An 2440 (1771); Walter M Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959); J A Mitchell, "The Last American" (published as a short novel, 1889); Larry Niven, "At the Bottom of a Hole" (Galaxy, December 1966); The World of Ptavvs (1966); Protector (1973); The Long ARM of Gil Hamilton (1976); Andre Norton, The Last Planet (original title Star Rangers) (1953); William Oberfield, "Escape from Pluto" (Planet Stories, Fall 1947); David Wright O'Brien, "Trapped on Titan" (Amazing Stories, June 1940); "Suicide Squadrons of Space" (Amazing Stories, August 1940); Vladimir Odoevsky, The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters (1835); Edgar Pangborn, A Mirror For Observers (1955); John Pierce, "Invariant" (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1944); Frederick Pohl and C M Kornbluth, Wolfbane (1959); "Critical Mass" (Galaxy, February 1962); Fletcher Pratt and Laurence Manning, "Expedition to Pluto" (Planet Stories, Winter 1939); Christopher Priest, Indoctrinaire (1970, 1979); Sandra Miesel, Introduction to Poul Anderson's The Psychotechnic League (1981); John Murray Reynolds, "Goddess of the Moon" (Planet Stories, Spring 1940); Kim Stanley Robinson, 2312 (2012); Ross Rocklynne, "Atom of Death" (Planet Stories, Winter 1940); R H Romans, "The Moon Conquerors" (Science Wonder Quarterly, Winter 1930); Eric Frank RussellSinister Barrier (Unknown, 1939);  Dreadful Sanctuary (1948); Three to Conquer (1956); "Jay Score" (Astounding Science Fiction, May 1941); Eric Frank Russell and Leslie J Johnson, "Seeker of Tomorrow" (Astounding Stories, July 1937); Nat Schachner, "Slaves of Mercury" (Astounding, September 1932); Bob Shaw, The Ceres Solution (1981) Fire Pattern (1984); The Peace Machine (1971, 1985); One Million Tomorrows (1970); Orbitsville Departure (1983); The Shadow of Heaven (1969); Ship of Strangers (1978); A Wreath of Stars (1976); Clifford Simak, "The World of the Red Sun" (Wonder Stories, December 1931); "Rule 18" (Astounding, July 1938); Cosmic Engineers (1939, 1950); Time And Again (1951); City (1952); Ring Around the Sun (1952, 1953); Clark Ashton Smith, "The Dimension of Chance" (Wonder Stories, November 1932); "The Great God Awto" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1940); "The Immeasurable Horror" (Weird Tales, September 1931); "Master of the Asteroid" (Wonder Stories, October 1932); "The Metamorphosis of Earth" (Weird Tales, September 1951); "The Plutonian Drug" (Amazing Stories, September 1934); "Seedling of Mars" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Fall 1931, after a plot by E.M.Johnston, and titled "The Planet Entity"; reprinted with given title in Tales of Science and Sorcery (1964)); "The Master of Destruction" (fragment and synopsis only; see www.eldritchdark.com); Cordwainer Smith, "War No. 81-Q" (The Adjutant, June 1928); "Mark Elf" (Saturn, May 1957); "No! No! Not Rogov!" (If, February 1959); Everett C Smith and R F Starzl, "The Metal Moon" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Winter 1932); Allen M Steele, "Martian Blood" in Old Mars, ed. George R R Martin and Gardner Dozois (2013); "Frogheads" in Old Venus, ed. George R R Martin and Gardner Dozois (2015); S M Stirling, The Sky People (2006); "Swords of Zar-Tu-Kan" in Old Mars (2013); Paul Tabori, The Doomsday Brain (1967); Theodore L Thomas, "The Fatal Third" (Planet Stories, November 1953); A E van Vogt, Slan (1940); "The Search" (Astounding, January 1943); "The Great Engine" (Astounding, July 1943); "Far Centaurus" (Astounding, January 1944); "The Rulers" (Astounding, March 1946); "Film Library" (Astounding, July 1946); "Ship of Darkness" (Fantasy Book, February 1948); "Dormant" (Startling Stories, November 1948); "The Earth Killers" (Super Science Stories, April 1949); The World of Null-A (1948); The Universe Maker (1953); Empire of the Atom (1956); The Mind Cage (1957); Moonbeast (1963); with E Mayne Hull, The Winged Man (1944, 1966); J M Walsh, "The Vanguard to Neptune" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1932); Hugh Walters, Operation Columbus (1959); Destination Mars (1963); Donald Wandrei, "Finality Unlimited" (Astounding Stories, September 1936); Stanley G Weinbaum, "Flight on Titan" (Astounding Stories, January 1935); "Planet of Doubt" (Astounding Stories, October 1935); "Redemption Cairn" (Astounding Stories, March 1936); [with Helen Weinbaum], "Tidal Moon" (Thrilling Winder Stories, December 1938); Manly Wade Wellman, "When Planets Clashed" (Wonder Stories Quarterly, Spring 1931); H G Wells, The Time Machine (1895); The First Men in the Moon (1901); The Shape of Things to Come (1933); G Peyton Wertenbaker, "The Coming of the Ice" (Amazing Stories, June 1926); John Wiggin, "Cave-Dwellers of Saturn" (Planet Stories, Winter 1939); Jack Williamson, "The Cosmic Express" (Amazing Stories, November 1930); The Legion of Space (1935, 1947); "The Crucible of Power" (Astounding Stories, February 1939); "Breakdown" (Astounding Science-Fiction, January 1942); Seetee Shock (1949, 1950); Seetee Ship (1951, 1968); Colin Wilson, The Mind Parasites (1967); The Philosopher's Stone (1969); The Space Vampires (1976); John Wyndham, "Wanderers of Time" (Wonder Stories, March 1933); Stowaway to Mars (1936); "Chronoclasm" (in The Seeds of Time (1956); The Outward Urge (1959, expanded with an extra episode 1961).

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