Saturday 5 March 2016

Poul Anderson's Legacies

Time Travel
Can anyone top the Time Patrol? Audrey Niffenegger's The Time Traveler's Wife is at least an excellent circular causality novel.

Cosmic SF
I know that there is much post-Anderson cosmic sf, e.g., by Gregory Benford, but have not really kept up with it.

Alternative Histories
We have seen that SM Stirling has developed this sub-genre further than Anderson.

Future Histories...
...in which extrasolar colonies are isolated for centuries, then reincorporated into an interstellar civilization. We are currently finding that Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history fits well into this sub-sub-genre.

Hard Fantasy?

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And, despite some difficulties with him, I would suggest including John Wright's three Golden Age as good examples
of "cosmic" SF.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
I gather that this John Wright trilogy is "cosmic" and post-Andersonian so it is at least potentially on my reading list - but blogging while reading sure slows down the reading while also increasing the enjoyment. I am getting far more out of KING DAVID'S SPACESHIP by continually pausing to reflect, analyze, summarize, compare etc.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, I would agree in calling Wright's three Golden Age books cosmic and post-Andersonian. To say nothing of how Wright said he had been inspired, in part, by PA's HARVEST OF STARS books. He even used the Andersonian neologism "sophotect."

The only non Anderson time traveling book I really liked was L. Sprague de Camp's LEST DARKNESS FALL.

Sean