"Life-Line"

How much of the future do we really want to know? How much of our personal future? — Heinlein's first published story, an interesting meditation on mortality.
 

A nice, custom house in Los Angeles — but also a tesseract with surprising dimensional properties. A neat multi-spatial tangle.
No tie-ins to other stories.
Reprinted in non-Future History collections and anthologies.
Not in The Past Through Tomorrow.
 

Invention of the Douglas-Martin sun-power screens. — Enjoyable minor story.
Included in The Man Who Sold the Moon (six-story collection, 1950; many paperback printings have only four stories, including "Let There Be Light").
Not in The Past Through Tomorrow.
 

"The Roads Must Roll"

Novelet; the mechanized roads are a hybrid of railroad, freeway, and parallel conveyer belts. They dominate transportation for a while, with all that implies in terms of jobs, industry, and the economy. — Sometimes I think this could never happen; other times I read some bit in the news, and think that it may yet.
 

"Blowups Happen"

Novelet; about an atomic power plant, written before any existed. — The psychological-blowup half of the idea never rang quite true for me; yes, sensitive people may need to work under enormous pressures, but they mostly continue to function. Sure, psychological blowups can happen; but I see no inevitability. — The atomic-blowup half of the idea perhaps won't come true. But I certainly agree with Heinlein's idea that our future power generation and heavy industry belong in orbit, and on Lunar Farside, and elsewhere Out There. We have only one useful biosphere in the immediate vicinity, and we should be careful of it.
 

A businessman decides to realize his dream of space travel by taking steps himself to make it a commercial possibility. — If in our real sub-lunar world, there is one man who arguably did more than any other to educate and persuade the American public about Luna and space travel, that man is Heinlein himself. Robert A. Heinlein truly may be called The Man Who Sold the Moon.
Short novel; first published in the collection The Man Who Sold the Moon. Sequel is "Requiem", below.
 

The crew building the first space station.
 

Slice-of-life: a space-pilot and his wife.
 

A short but moving follow-up to "The Man Who Sold the Moon", set years later.
 

A young officer is standing watch in a nuclear-missile base on Luna, when a putsch begins. — As a teenager, years before I had anything to do with comparable responsibilities, this story struck me profoundly; later — and even now — it makes my scalp tingle. For some time it has been my conviction that most Medal of Honor decisions are made all alone, under the assumption that no one will ever know; and for most of them, no one ever does.
 

A joke, but a bit of Lunar slice-of-life.
 

Slight lost-in-the-Lunar-landscape story.
 

Slight nostalgia story.
 

A future jack-of-all-trades service company.
 

How to find a blind girl lost somewhere on the vast desert area of the Moon? — A neat little problem.
 

A space-pilot grounded for agoraphobia developed after drifting into emptiness in free fall. — Psychology and suspense work well together here.
 

Rhysling, "the Blind Singer of the Spaceways". — The most famous Future History story.
 

Novelet; a smug citizen is shanghaied into indentured labor on Venus. — Interesting story on the idea that socioeconomic phases in the development of space travel inevitably will echo those of imperial expansion during earlier times on Earth.
 

A teenage girl and her friends enjoy low-gravity flying, with wing harnesses, inside a two-mile-diameter air-filled Lunar cavern. — Matter-of-fact technology and charming slice-of-life romance at the same time. One of the last written, and perhaps the best of all the shorter Future History stories.
 

Short novel, about the revolt against a religious dictatorship in America. A young soldier goes from innocent and ignorant palace-guard of the Prophet, through disillusionment, induction into a Masonic underground lodge, to revolutionary officer. — I'd call this kind of story a "revolution procedural"; others by Heinlein (not in the Future History) are "Gulf" and The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress. Partly thanks to this warning story, the premise has lost much of its power to shock since it first appeared.
 

Novelet; a citizen convicted of a crime chooses internal exile in the walled realm of Coventry rather than psychological rehabilitation. But Coventry isn't quite the free-wheeling individualist paradise he anticipated. — An adventure, but also a fascinating exploration of individuality versus conformity, voluntary and involuntary social behavior, and the origins of the State.
 

A young man joins a Civilian Conservation Corps for the Solar System. Introduces one of my favorite Heinlein characters, the modest mathematical genius Andrew Jackson "Slipstick" Libby.
 

Novel, revised and expanded for book publication, 1958. A disturbing meditation on longevity, with the personal and political side-effects. Introduces the great Heinlein character Lazarus Long. One of Heinlein's important novels.
 

The Future History up to this point spans our next couple of centuries, starting more or less from now. There is a gap of more centuries before the subsequent stories, which are relatively distant outliers beyond the main sequence.

The descendants of a starship crew on a multi-generational journey; they have lost all sense of journeying except in phrase and legend. Many are mutants. Their lives within the huge starship are savage, and they have had to re-invent primitive skills. — A memorable concept, exotic adventures inside the starship, with some really vivid scenes.
Novella; the first half of Orphans of the Sky.
Not in The Past Through Tomorrow.
 

Novella; close sequel to "Universe"; the second half of Orphans of the Sky.
Not in The Past Through Tomorrow.
 

Substantial novel; Putnam, 1973. Further adventures and escapades of Lazarus Long, and friends and relations — given galactic elbow-room and sufficient longevity to mosey around and get involved in some of it. Read The Past Through Tomorrow first.
Not in The Past Through Tomorrow.