Wednesday 1 January 2014

New Comparisons

Happy New Year, Poul Anderson fans. Thank you for continued page views during a period of blog quiescence. I have continued to post about Neil Gaiman's The Sandman on Comics Appreciation and have found three more Anderson-Gaiman parallels:

fairy gold;
Faerie withdrawal with the rise of science;
dialogue written in blank verse.

(I have just remembered one other: quotations from poems by James Elroy Flecker.)

Meanwhile, my daughter has given me the first three volumes of Iain M. Banks' Culture sf series. Previously on this blog, I have discussed:

HG Wells;
Olaf Stapledon;
CS Lewis;
Robert Heinlein;
Isaac Asimov;
James Blish;
Larry Niven

- in order to compare them with Anderson. I am less familiar with more recent sf but Banks might now join the list of comparisons.

Banks wrote contemporary novels as Iain Banks, then started his long sf series as Iain M Banks. The first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, like James Blish's After Such Knowledge Trilogy, derives its title from a short phrase in TS Eliot's The Waste Land. Banks' interstellar society is in some ways similar to the one presented in Douglas Adams' A Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy.

When Wells wrote his "fantastic and imaginative romances," many by now familiar ideas were still new:

heavier than air flight;
tanks;
heat rays;
poison gas;
world wars;
interplanetary projectiles;
antigravity;
time travel.

Since then, many later ideas have become all too familiar background material in much sf:

hyperdrives - that cannot be activated too deep in a gravity well;
artificial gravity;
interstellar civilizations - waging wars;
humanoid beings on many extrasolar planets;
telepathy;
artificial intelligence.

Banks had clearly mastered all these later ideas before starting to write Consider Phlebas. He adds the questionable idea of "human" species on many planets, apparently resulting from parallel evolution.

Anderson deploys the second list of concepts brilliantly in his History of Technic Civilization, where the quality of his writing overcomes conceptual cliches. I am currently assessing Banks by the same criteria.

4 comments:

Jim Baerg said...

"hyperdrives - that cannot be activated too deep in a gravity well"

I to some extent prefer the less common idea of hyperdrives that can only be activated in a deep gravity well, so to leave our solar system we would need to use a spaceship with an *excellent* heat shield on one side to get very close to the sun. I saw it used in "Permanence" by Karl Schroeder. Also in a few unrelated short stories in Analog.
To me it makes a bit more 'sense' that jumping into 'hyperspace' might be easier where space-time is already warped.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

But I think Anderson used that "kind" of hyperdrive because it made for interesting plot twists. As, for example, when Flandry took chances going hyper while still in the gravity well of Talwin as he was escaping that planet with Ydwyr the Seeker as his hostage/captive in A CIRCUS OF HELLS. The captain of a Merseian destroyer also took even more chances going hyper like that, to stay in range of Flandry. Bigger ships were at higher risk doing that than a small scoutboat of the kind Flandry had.

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

Schroeder just had different plot twists imposed by the difficulties & opportunities of that alternate hyperdrive.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

And that's good, different writers trying out different hypotheses!

Ad astra! Sean