Poul Anderson And CS Lewis

(i) Poul Anderson wrote several future histories. Future histories are one kind of fictional history. Other fictional histories include Tolkien's Middle Earth and Lewis' Narnia. The Narnia Chronicles cover the entire history of a universe with a flat earth and living stars from its creation by Aslan to its Last Battle and what happens after that. Thus, Narnia is comparable to Anderson's fantasies.

(ii) In Poul Anderson's "Journeys End," telepaths experience the problem of reading each other's distasteful thoughts. In Lewis' "The Shoddy Lands," Lewis himself enters the mental landscape of a self-absorbed woman. Being Lewis, he hears a knocking and a voice:

"'Child, child, child, let me in before the night comes.'"
-CS Lewis, "The Shoddy Lands" IN Lewis, The Dark Tower and other stories (London, 1983), pp. 104-111 AT p. 110.

(iii) Anderson is the most comprehensive writer about fictional time travel. Lewis' Ransom, Lewis, MacPhee, Orfieu and Scudamour begin "The Dark Tower" by discussing time travel just like Wells' Time Traveler and his dinner guests.

(iv) Anderson's sf is (very) "hard" whereas Lewis' is the opposite. Lacking scientific knowledge, Lewis deployed immense psychological and moral insights and knowledge of both literature and mythology.

(v) Both authors favored Norse mythology.

(vi) Anderson treated religious beliefs sympathetically whereas Lewis propagated a particular belief which he imaginatively restated three times, in the Narnia Chronicles, the Ransom Trilogy and The Great Divorce.

(vii) Anderson speculates about hereafters as about everything else whereas Lewis merely assumes survival. In The Great Divorce, ghosts are free to haunt buildings, communicate through mediums, settle in the grey town that is really Hell or catch a bus to the foothills of Heaven and stay there as long as they like. But does every individual consciousness really persist indefinitely and, if so, how?

(viii) Both authors exercised seemingly endless creative imagination.