Though he was apparently killed in the summer, he re-appears in extremely cold snow, nearly dies again by freezing, and is saved by a fur-clad woman named Diana.

The later 21st century people seem strangely incurious, showing little interest in how he had come to be among them and rather take his appearance for granted and proceed to explain to him the details of the social and political set-up of their world.

The book does not tell precisely how the protagonist came to wake up a century and a half after being killed in a car accident, and find himself wandering in the snow in the body of a denizen of the future who had had enough of life and chose to commit suicide.

Conversely, in For Us, the Living, Scudder does establish for several years a de facto domination over the Mississippi Valley, and terrorizes much of the rest of the country by Ku Klux Klan–type thugs—but he is stopped at the last moment by the counter-mobilization of libertarians, and despite mass voter intimidation carries only Tennessee and Alabama.

The abolition of the taboo on public nudity would re-appear as a major issue in Heinlein's The Puppet Masters—though under radically different circumstances to those in the present book.

However, in the book's timeline the US stays out of the war, and it ends due to Germany's economic collapse rather than its military defeat (similar to the scenario given in H. G. Wells' The Shape of Things to Come, four years before).

However, in the context of a later war there is a depiction of Latin American aircraft carriers launching a devastating surprise attack on New York City, which bears some similarities to the methods which the Japanese would use at Pearl Harbor three years after the book was written.

After the war a European Federation is formed and Edward is made into a Constitutional Emperor of Europe, a task which he fulfills with great success.

The book—written in the aftermath of the Democrats' heavy losses in the 1938 mid-term elections—assumes that by 1938–39 Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal had failed due to the constant attacks by his opponents, that in the 1940 election, Roosevelt would prove unelectable, that his downfall would drag the Democratic Party to ruin and that a sharp drift to the Right would culminate in an extreme-right dictatorship in the late 1940s—which would, however, prove short-lived and after which the pendulum would swing sharply to the Left again.

Heinlein assigned to Fiorello H. La Guardia—at the time of writing a reformer Mayor of New York and outspoken supporter of Roosevelt, despite being nominally a Republican—the role of picking up FDR's torch, as a militant reforming President in the 1950s who would lead a head-on confrontation with the banking system, effectively nationalize the banks and institute the system of Social Credit.

Several decades later, a John Delano Roosevelt is mentioned among the six highly regarded reformers who revise the US Constitution and institute the new regime seen in 2086.

The mechanism for this homesourcing is not described in much technical detail, but it appears to be similar to a high-definition video signal interfaced with something like modern chroma key technology.

The society as a whole respects privacy in what are considered private sphere events, such as intimacy, closeness, interpersonal relationships and even identity in business and governmental transactions.

Cynthia Brown noted in her review that (...) Heinlein depicts a society where it is taken for granted that a woman may freely pursue a career, as well as choose her sexual partner(s) and live openly with a man without need of any sanction by a religious or secular authority.

Already many decades before 2086, we live in such a society, and tend to forget that in 1939 when the book was written this was still quite a radical vision, and that this may well have been a major reason for publishers to reject it.

The protagonist Perry, who can be said to stand for Heinlein himself, is astonished at seeing a woman about to take up an experimental rocket, and exclaims: "But that's man's work!".

A few pages later, the rocket crashes and Vivian is very severely punished for trying her hand at "a man's work": she was "burned to a crisp" and lost her right leg, and Heinlein neglects to tell the reader whether or not the doctors managed to save her life.

It is left to the male hero from the past to take up the mission to which the poor Vivian was not equal, design a new and better rocket fuel (with his engineering knowledge a century out of date?)