Friday 13 September 2019

Many Successors

It is remarkable that, within the works of a single author, Poul Anderson, HG Wells' Time Traveler (a fictional individual inventor) is succeeded (in literary terms) not just by one comparable character but by:

Martin Saunders in his time projector (an individual inventor);

mutant time travelers (many individuals from different periods);

the Time Patrol (an organization);

Wardens and Rangers (two rival organizations);

the futurians in The Dancer From Atlantis (a future civilization);

several other time traveling characters;

the space-time travelers in Tau Zero and The Avatar;

the immortal intergalactic space-jumpers of World Without Stars (who, like the Time Traveler, hope not to arrive in space already occupied by a material object. See here.)

We value Wellsian continuity and Andersonian creativity.

Just as The Time Machine is one short volume among Wells' works, Anderson's four novels and two collections about time travel are, numerically, just a handful of his many works but they are also important ones.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would also argue that in his devotion to real science and the care he took to use the sciences accurate in his hard SF, was a successor to Jules Verne, who was, along with Wells, one of the founders of modern science fiction. Verne's pioneering hard SF is represented by such works as 20,000 LEAGUES UNDER THE SEA, and FROM THE EARTH TO THE MOON.

Ad astra! Sean