Poul Anderson: for discussion of Anderson, read the blog to date;
SM Stirling: succeeds and surpasses Anderson in alternative history fiction;
John C. Wright: highly imaginative "Cutting Edge" speculative fiction;
Stieg Larsson: not sf but contemporary thrillers with content that would have been sf until recently.
Does Wright match Anderson or Stirling in quality of writing? I cannot assess this yet, having so far read only part of one novel.
Since Larsson describes details of intelligence services and since Anderson's Time Patrol is an intelligence service behind and beyond all others, I imagine the Patrol as observing from the background although not intervening but this is merely an association in the mind of a single reader. However, everything interconnects. Our brains connect data in different ways.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Almost the only "mainstream" authors I've read with interest and pleasure for many years were Tom Wolfe and Christopher Buckley. But they were satirists giving us bitingly comic critiques of the foibles, follies, and lunacies of our times. More akin to Juvenal, Jonathan Swift, and Evelyn Waugh, than to more "conventional" contemporary authors.
I do agree with what you said about Anderson's Time Patrol being an Intelligence agency, among many other things. But the example I would most likely have cited from PA works would be the Naval Intelligence Corps of his Terran Empire. After all, unlike the Time Patrol, we do get glimpses of how the leaders and administrators of the Corps worked.
Sean
Sean,
You are right but I am trying to imagine the Patrol operating in the background of Larsson's Swedish Intelligence Services which I can't do with Terran Naval Intelligence.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Oops! I should have remembered that!
Sean
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