These science fiction futures depend on the ways that their creators understand the past. As British writer Ken MacLeod put it, “History is the trade secret of science fiction, and theories of history are its invisible engine.” Writers often draw on specific historical events and interpretations and write them forward. Isaac Asimov reimagined the decline of the Roman Empire, Ada Palmer structured four novels around the political ideas of the Enlightenment, and AnnaLinden Weller (writing as Arkady Martine) reinscribed the Byzantine frontier on galactic imperialism. The national independence movements that first swept the Americas, then parts of Europe, and then the European empires in Asia and Africa provide one of the most popular of such templates. When I was studying for PhD exams in the late 1960s, a go-to reference was R. R. Palmer’s The Age of the Democratic Revolution: A Political History of Europe and America, 1760–1800 (1959, 1964). Looking at the world of science fiction, a historian of the future might be similarly inspired to write The Age of the Planetary Revolution: A Political History of the Solar System, 2075–2350.
This Age of Planetary Revolution is a consensus future drawn from history, one that writers of science fiction have used and modified in dialogue with their predecessors. Some delve deeply into the independence movements themselves. Others assume that their well-read readers, familiar with this shared future, will nod knowingly at passing references to an earlier planetary independence movement. The Age of Planetary Revolution has been a usable future history for writers whose politics range from hard conservative to confirmed socialist. It is a story that reaches a rough end point when the independence struggles have succeeded and the mother planet and former colonies enter a new period of solar-system-wide diplomacy and war. This future has its own history.
Writing in the technology-oriented “golden age” of American science fiction in the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s, Robert Heinlein espoused a sort of “don’t tread on me” patriotism that resonated with Cold War Americanism as well as his personal libertarian bent. In his novel The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress (1966), the former penal colony on the moon is in its third generation. Three million Loonies are fed up with the heavy-handed Lunar Authority and the onerous terms it imposes on trade with the Federated Nations of Earth. They want to throw off the colonial yoke, protesting, organizing, and declaring independence . . . on July 4, 2076. They win their revolution by bombarding Earth with carefully targeted rocks, and Luna Free State can shape its own future.