Comparisons With James Blish

See here.

Poul Anderson had to grow on me. When I started to read prose science fiction in the early 1960's, I was very impressed with James Blish's Earthman, Come Home, not yet knowing that it was one volume of a kind of series called a "future history." Blish became my top sf writer. Later, when I had read the rest of Cities In Flight, I thought that it was much better than either Robert Heinlein's Future History or Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. I did not yet compare it with any series by Anderson because I did not as yet know that Dominic Flandry was the hero of a series, still less that that series covered just one period of an even longer future history. When I did learn of the History of Technic Civilization, it took me a while to realize that there was a lot more to it than just a van Rijn series and a Flandry series strung together.

(It was inappropriate to compare the Cities In Flight tetralogy with the Future History. The former holds up well as a future history until somewhere in Vol III, Earthman, Come Home, but by then the antiagathics are keeping a small group of characters alive for centuries so that the reader loses any sense of historical process and is occasionally surprised to be told how much time is elapsing.

(The Future History is effectively a tetralogy because its concluding fifth volume is a brief coda that does not progress the fictitious historical narrative. But Volumes I-IV have almost no continuing characters, instead sharing common background references, with the events of earlier stories becoming the historical past of later stories.)

Blish's major works, which could be collected in just four omnibus volumes, comprise:

two future histories, Cities In Flight and The Seedling Stars;
one non-linear sf sequence, the Haertel Scholium;
one theological trilogy, After Such Knowledge.

His Hugo award winning sf novel, A Case of Conscience, is both a Haertel overdrive novel and Volume III of After Such Knowledge, whereas Volumes I and II are a historical novel and a contemporary fantasy, respectively.

Those familiar with Poul Anderson's works will recognize several parallels:

hard sf;
more than one future history;
historical fiction;
fantasy;
theological concerns -

- and one major difference, unfortunately a much smaller output from Blish.