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.