Sunday, 24 August 2014

Common Features

A fictitious version of Mars.
A fictitious version of Venus.
A future history.
Being edited by John W Campbell.

Each of these four features links several of the twelve authors listed in the previous post. In fact, some of the features link more than you might expect:

ERB's Moon Maid trilogy is a future history;
CSL's That Hideous Strength is a reply to Wells' and Stapledon's future histories;
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles just misses being a future history because it covers only a single generation.

Greg Bear, whom I am just starting to read, has a Martian novel. Poul Anderson, whom this blog is mainly about, was, like Heinlein, Asimov and Blish, influentially edited by Campbell and created more versions of Mars and Venus and more future histories than any of the others.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

And CS Lewis also wrote commentary about science fiction, such as his important essay "Religion and Rocketry," which I believe deserves to be better known. You will, of course, recall how I used that work for my essay "God and Alien in Anderson's Technic Civilization."

Sean