Literary Lineages Etc

Are Rudyard Kipling, Poul Anderson and SM Stirling a kind of literary lineage? Having recently compared Anderson's The Game Of Empire to Kipling's Kim, I will shortly read Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, to be discussed either on this blog or on the Science Fiction blog as appropriate. Of course, Stirling could be influenced by Kipling directly as well as, or instead of, via Anderson.

Returning to the present, it was unpredictable either that the second NESFA collection would include "Marque and Reprisal" or that this unexpected inclusion would generate further discussion of Gunnar Heim. Thus, the blog cannot possibly have any planned direction.

Continuing the summary from the previous post, the Aleriona artificial environment includes both a fountain and a bosket. Anderson cannot have expected his readers to understand every word that he used but did trust them to appreciate a vocabulary richer than usual in popular fiction. Over the course of nearly three years of blogging, I have learned to look out for:

words for which I need a dictionary;
uses of Latin;
moments when a character realizes without yet stating the solution to a problem;
equivalents of grass on extrasolar planets;
different means of faster than light travel;
the almost systematic application of alternative approaches to major themes like immortality, time travel, artificial intelligence and interstellar civilization.

In section 4 of "Marque and Reprisal," Gunnar Heim interviews another politician, the French minister for extraterrestrial affairs and chief representative in the World Parliament. That completes preliminary discussions. Heim will soon take action. Returning to a conversation listed in the previous post, I think that he is way too hard on his daughter.