Future History (Heinlein)

He considers The Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, and To Sail Beyond the Sunset to be too weakly linked to the Future History to be included.

Bill Patterson includes To Sail Beyond the Sunset, on the theory that the discrepancies between it and the rest of the Future History are explained by assigning it to the same "bundle of related timelines" in the "World as Myth" multiverse.

[5] However, he lists a number of stories that he believes were never really intended to be part of Future History, even though they were included in The Past Through Tomorrow: "Life-Line" (which was written before Heinlein published the Future History chart; however, Lazarus Long does reference the protagonist of "Life-Line" and his device in Time Enough for Love), "The Menace from Earth", "—We Also Walk Dogs", and the stories originally published in the Saturday Evening Post ("Space Jockey", "It's Great to Be Back!

Gifford states that "Although the twelve juvenile novels are not completely inconsistent with the Future History, neither do they form a thorough match with that series for adult readers.

These stories were key points in the Future History, so Heinlein gave a rough description of Nehemiah Scudder which made his reign easy to visualize—a combination of John Calvin, Girolamo Savonarola, Joseph Franklin Rutherford, and Huey Long.

His rise to power began when one of his flock, the widow of a wealthy man who would have disapproved of Scudder, died and left him enough money to establish a television station.

Though this period was integral to the human diaspora that would follow several hundred years later, Heinlein stated that he was never able to write them because they featured Scudder prominently; he "dislike(d) him too much".

In fact, the Libertarian regime seen in full bloom in that book's 2086 came into being in direct reaction to Scudder's attempt to impose puritanical mores on the entire American society.