the chronology of captain future
by
"lone wolf"
edited with comments by zendexor

The chronology of the Captain Future continuum poses a considerable challenge for the researcher. I'm grateful that Lone Wolf has tackled it - I should have quailed at the task myself. Anyhow, he has obtained some solid results. What next? Who knows, perhaps the Leigh Brackett universe...

I was recently re-reading some of the early novels from the Captain Future series, following the order of the issues of the original magazine and trying to observe how the world-building of that version of OSS gradually fills in the picture from one book to the next (the first time I read them, I did so out of order, just reading one book or another online as I was able to find them, and so I couldn't follow the development of the theme). They were written at a fast pace, as Hamilton himself admits, and without much thought about the consistency, and as for the era in which the events are suppose to happen, it seems that only in the first two books are we given some data about the timeline. More such information is found not in the novels themselves but in the additional features of the original magazine, called The Worlds of Tomorrow, which consist of articles describing the planets visited in the respective tales (in those two first issues, Jupiter and Pluto), and gives some of the fictional history of the Solar System exploration. And so I noticed that there are some data, which sometimes are not quite consistent with the others, unless we take them as more or less approximate – as I said, the author didn't have much time to think about such details. Thus while comparing these sources I managed to compile a short chronology of the early space exploration in the Futurian universe, which I'd like to share here:

1971 – the first space flight to the Moon of Gorham Johnson.

1979 – expedition to Venus and Mercury, lead by Gorham Johnson.

1988 – expedition to Mars and Jupiter lead by Gorham Johnson and Marc Carew. Johnson dies on Callisto.

1991 – expedition to Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, lead by Marc Carew.

28 February 1993 - The expedition of Marc Carew, which starts in 1991, reaches Neptune. [For source, see note below from Lone Wolf dated 7th July 2023]

1994 – first unsuccessful attempt to reach Pluto, lead by Marc Carew. The expedition is given up for lost around 1999. (According to the novel Calling Captain Future the expedition disappears in the “Sargasso Sea” of space. But in the novel Treasure on Thunder Moon, which is considered to belong to the same universe and is set in 2018, the protagonist says that his first space voyage was “with Marc Carew on his third expedition, in '98”. Thus it seems that this happens in an alternative timeline: the Thunder Moon Oberon also is described as lacking any settlements and far more inhospitable than the version of that satellite in Captain Future's Challenge, where one of the gravium mines is located there.)

Meanwhile in years 1990, 1994 and 1997 unnamed explorers visited Jupiter and fixed a site for possible Earth colony in the continent which Carew named South Equatoria.

2000, 12 January – start of the first expedition to Pluto, lead by Jan Wenzi. It returns in 2004.

2005 – the first Jovian Expedition, lead by Robert Caswell. It lands on 12 June 2005 on the south-east coast of South Equatoria and there it is founded the city of Jovopolis.

2005 - A scientific commission of the System Government visits planet Neptune, conducts some submarine explorations and discovers rich deposits of gold platinum and other precious ores and heavy deposits of the rare metal gravium. [For source, see note below from Lone Wolf dated 7th July 2023]

2008 – first unsuccessful attempt to colonize Pluto. The colonists die from freezing.

2011 – foundation of the city of Tartarus on Pluto.

2012 – establishment of the Interplanetary Prison on Cerberus. The first governor of Jupiter, Robert Caswell, is killed in a crash-landing in the jungle outside Jovopolis.

2015 – radium bandits terrorize the Jupiter-Earth ship lines.

Now, in Captain Future and the Space Emperor it is said that Roger Newton decides to move to the Moon with his wife and Simon Wright the Brain in June 1990, then then they actually move “ten weeks later” and all this has happened “twenty five years ago”, so Captain Future should have been born in 1990 or the early 1991. This puts the events from this novel around 2015 – 2016. In Calling Captain Future again it is mentioned that his parents escaped to the Moon “twenty five years ago”, which dates the events in the second novel around the same time, only a little later. But then later in the text Captain Future says that the criminal biologist Roj and his accomplice Kalak have been caught “five years ago” and given life sentences in the interplanetary prison on Cerberus, which according to the article about Pluto was established in 2012. This puts the events of the second novel not earlier than 2017. So I guess the dates from the novels should be taken as approximate.

No more exact dates are given in the later novels, as far as I know or can remember, only in the additional feature The Futuremen from the issue 13 of the magazine (Winter, 1943), which tells the story of The Puzzling Case of the Space Queen: there is a mention that the imposter Garis Crain, who poses in it as Captain Future's double in a series of robberies, has escaped earlier from Syrtis Prison on Mars on 11 June 2000.

And then there is an indirect datum from The Comet Kings which doesn't fit at all – since the events of this novel happen during a passing of the Halley's Comet, they should have occurred in 2061, when Captain Future would be around 70 years old!

Anyhow the first 10 novels figure the president of the Solar System, James Carthew, who doesn't actually complete his full mandate, being assassinated in “Outlaws of the Moon”, which implies that the events in all those novels cannot be too far separated in time. So we have more or less the equivalent of our present era in that alternative universe. I may add that this is so childishly optimistic a vision of our “past future”, that it's difficult to imagine how it was all actually written during the years of the war!

Also in the German adaptation of the Japanese anime “Captain Future”, made in the 70s and based on the novels, it is said in the first episode that the story begins in year 2200 (which is not mentioned in the original cartoon), but there the setting of the whole series is changed to interstellar...

Note from Lone Wolf, 7th July 2023:

Here are two more fictional dates to add to the Captain Future timeline from the article about Neptune, related to the third novel (issue Summer 1940 of the original magazine), which I found yesterday:

28 February 1993 - The expedition of Marc Carew, which starts in 1991, reaches Neptune.