Three Literary Contexts

Recent posts have compared Poul Anderson's time travel canon to Twain, Wells etc and his main future history series to Heinlein, Asimov etc. Previous posts have compared Anderson's future histories to those of Wells (see here) and Stapledon (see here) and his heroic fantasies to those of Tolkien (see here and here).

These six writers:

Twain
Wells
Stapledon
Tolkien
Heinlein
Asimov

- are known names and big sellers. Stapledon may be less well known outside science fiction but is certainly significant within it.

The six represent three distinct strands of fictional writing:

(i) older, more literary, pre-magazine, pre-genre "science fiction," retroactively classified as such (although I suppose that A Connecticut Yankee... is fantasy);

(ii) Golden Age American sf, the Campbell era;

(iii) modern fantasy fiction derived from Northern European mythology.

My point, as ever, is that Anderson is a worthy successor of (i) and a major practitioner of both (ii) and (iii). I will have a little more to say about Tolkien but first must go out to see a film.