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When Pournelle began writing his future history in the early 1970's, the Cold War had mellowed. In the immediate post-war period, war between the USA and the USSR had seemed possible. The "Truman Doctrine" had essentially promised that America would let the Soviets have a free hand in their own "sphere of influence" as long as they didn't try to expand it. Eisenhower refused to intervene in Hungary in 1956, and three years later invited Khrushchev to America. Johnson promoted trade with Eastern Europe. And finally, Nixon established the policy of "detente", making it clear that he considered good relations with the USSR more important than protecting America's allies from Soviet expansion.
From this vantage point, Pournelle's vision of a military alliance between the two super-powers seems logical. Perhaps even inevitable, in light of the fact that both the USA and the USSR found the growth of an independent "Third World" a potentially "destabilizing" development. Thus, the CoDominium: a merging of American and Soviet foreign policies, even as their domestic policies retained their separate characters.
In Pournelle's earlier chronologies, he places the date of the CoDominium's founding as 1990.
When Falkenberg's Legion went to press – in the year 1990 itself! – this date was pushed back. The CD was now created by "a series of treaties between 1990 and 2000".
But in 1991, the USSR collapsed, and this whole timeline became "impossible". (Not that the collapse of the 20th century's longest-lasting military empire was distressing to Dr. Pournelle!)
In Prince of Mercenaries (1993), Pournelle and Stirling took into account the collapse of the Soviet Union, and suggested that economic hardship could result in the "resurrection" of the USSR via "a new series of military and political coups". This idea is now fundamental to the "canon" of Pournelle's future history; note that it is even mentioned briefly in The Gripping Hand (page 291, paperback edition). This Soviet revial would allow the CD to form by the target date of 2000. (Of course, Pournelle, Stirling, and Niven were not suggesting this was probable; they just needed to salvage the fictional timeline for these stories!)
Today, Russia is indeed an ally of the United States in the war in Afghanistan. But the Communist Party is looking less and less viable as a future ruler of Russia. And a revival of a Communist dictatorship in Russia seems incredibly unlikely. Furthermore, even a Communist-ruled Russia would hardly possess the means to reacquire its former empire. Thus, a USA-USSR super-state must be seen as all but impossible.
There are several "fixes" which could be made for our fictional chronology:
Regardless of how this is resolved, the current body of work will stand as good science fiction. Wells' When the Sleeper Awakes and Heinlein's The Man Who Sold the Moon are much more invalid today than Pournelle's works, yet they certainly are not rendered any less readable for this. (And if you want to see something really anachronistic, check out Olaf Stapledon's drastically-wrong prediction of World War II, made in 1930 in his magnum opus Last and First Men!)
However, this "reality-check" does relate to another issue: the inclusion of two other books into this timeline.
Jerry Pournelle's short-story collection High Justice and its sequel Exiles to Glory are often listed as part of Pournelle's "Future History", especially on the ubiquitous "order forms" which publishers place in the end pages of paperback books. But there is no way this is possible.
If we were reading all these books in 1975, the advanced technology and politics seen in the stories of Bill Adams, Aeneas MacKenzie, and Glenda Hanson might conceivably be expected during the last part of the 20th century. Perhaps this was originally the intention, and the creation of the CD and the decay of American society took place after these stories had ended. But as of 1990 (or 2001) there is no more "room" for these stories in the timeline, no matter how the issue of the Cold War is dealt with.
In any event, there is no evidence that Pournelle himself considered these stories to be set in Falkenberg's universe.
They are, nonetheless, excellent stories. And I have always been suspicious that the creators of the movie Outland had read "High Justice" a few times before putting their movie together......
Jerry Pournelle's Future History . . . . . Gorbachev, Yeltsin, and High Justice
Updated 9 December 2001 by Larry King
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