Science Fiction: Isaac Asimov's Future History
James Blish Appreciation: James Blish: Okies
Poul Anderson Appreciation: Poul Anderson’s Future Histories
Science Fiction: Larry Niven's Future Histories
Science Fiction: An Unexpected Future History
Science Fiction: Future Histories
See also:
(i) "...the shining belt of the Milky Way." (p. 13) (See The Milky Way)
(ii) "The galactic belt glistened, diamond against infinite darkness." (p. 50) (For other references to "galactic belt," see here.)
This description of the galaxy is followed, as happens sometimes, by a reference to another galaxy:
"...the far mysterious shimmer of the Andromeda Nebula..." (ibid.)
(iii) "The Milky Way turned her hair frosty and glowed in her eyes." (p. 65)
This description is unique: the galaxy reflected in a woman's hair and eyes.
We have noticed most Andersonian descriptions of the Milky Way by now but it is always possible to find a few more except that that is enough for this evening.
Tomorrow: rain or more gardening and Zen in the evening; blogging on an as and when basis.
The Advisory Council of the spaceship Astra clarifies the need for selection and interpretation of historical facts. The examples given are reasonable. They could obviously be discussed further but here they are offered only as examples. "Mohammedanism" should be "Islam" but that is the kind of historical detail that is always with us.
"'...man being what he is, moral judgments are inevitable. Was it right, was it desirable that Christianity take over Europe...?'" (p. 16)
Do we need to discuss whether this was right or desirable? It happened and we certainly need to understand why. One question in a future history takes us back into past history and, within the works of the Andersons, to the times when merfolk fled from an exorcism or when the last King of Ys converted to Christianity.
I have a Religion and Philosophy blog for such questions but fewer people read it.
We are still with the inexhaustible subject of future histories and there is more to be said than can be fitted into this lunch break. As ever on this blog, our focus is on Poul Anderson even if we first refer to the earlier Campbell future historians: Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.
Blish's Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity in Welcome To Mars and has invented the first faster-than-light interstellar drive in "Common Time." These are different achievements. See Gyrogavitics. The discoverer of antigrav and the inventor of FTL need not have been given the same name.
Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, opens with Heinlein's Time Chart, a PREFACE by the author and an INTRODUCTION by John Campbell. None of these three texts, with the partial exception of the Time Chart, is a fictional introduction written as from a future historical perspective whereas Asimov has Encyclopedia Galactica and Blish has Acreff-Monales, The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits.
In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, a committee, meeting in interludes between the stories, discusses how to teach history and explains to its newest member that teachers must select and interpret facts and raise children to become "'...intellectually trained and emotionally mature...'" (p. 17) adults who can debate interpretations of historical events "'...with pleasure and profit.'" (ibid.)
Early in the second story, "The Rogue," the narrator refers to himself and his readers as "We..." (p. 43) That single pronoun shows that this speaker/author is not the omniscient narrator of most fiction but a counterpart of the narrator in Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, who comes across as the writer of popular magazine articles published during the "Green Hills" period of the Future History.
In haste. Will expand as necessary later.
Poul Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains is a single-volume future history about people living on terraformed asteroids thanks to gyrogravitics, a technology not possessed by Heinlein's characters - who do gain control of gravity in one story set on Earth although this technology is not mentioned subsequently and later interstellar craft are spun to simulate gravity. A technology lost during the Interregnum of Volume III?
Interstellar travel has begun at the beginning of Tales Of The Flying Mountains. Indeed, it is the travellers themselves who review their asteroidal history for their own benefit and, of course, for ours.
There, if you want it, is a partial comparison between Heinlein's Future History and one of Anderson's eight future histories before I turn in for the night, looking forward to a morning of gardening. Good night.
It seems that Poul Anderson's gyrogravitics and James Blish's "spindizzy" arise out of the same set of observations and speculations about rotation, gravity and magnetism - and I cannot follow the technicalities. However, Blackett's predictions did not pan out and, even if they had done, they might have led to Anderson's control of gravity but there would have been no reason for them also to lead to Blish's faster-than-light drive. See Flying Mountains And Cities. Blish's They Shall Have Stars presents a keen sense of his characters experiencing conceptual and technological upheavals while anticipating consequent social transformations. However, Blish's prologue or prelude volume could be decoupled from the subsequent flying cities series and might instead presage something more like Anderson's terraformed asteroids. However, in any case, neither of these futures has come to be. Gravity remains uncontrolled.
