Wednesday 26 April 2017

Starting The Sunrise Lands

Status quo:

stalled on The Golden Age;
still rereading Larsson;
some technical delay with accessing a Poul Anderson ebook;
starting to check out SM Stirling's The Sunrise Lands.

The deal on the blog is:

Poul Anderson addressed nearly every aspect of sf, including alternative histories;

Stirling succeeds and surpasses Anderson specifically in the sub-genre of alternative histories;

we find Andersonian allusions and parallels in Stirling's novels;

but we would not continue to read Stirling if all that he did was to echo Anderson!

A worthy successor is also an original.

The Sunrise Lands:

is 512 pages of gapless prose;
begins in CY22/2020 A.D., thus twelve years after the previous volume;
therefore, will feature the original hero's son now grown to adulthood;
begins with several laudatory quotations including comparisons with Anderson that warrant discussion.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Of course I agree S.M. Stirling was a worthy colleague and then successor of Poul Anderson. And, while I agree Stirling surpassed PA in developing the subgenre of alternate histories, that was not the case hard SF. Anderson still has few rivals in "main" genre of SF.

Not that Stirling couldn't write good hard SF. He could! But even those works of his tended to be in alternate worlds: such as the Lords of Creation books and the Draka series.

Sean