The Time Machine
The First Men In The Moon
The War Of The Worlds
The Invisible Man
Doctor Who is recognized in popular consciousness. He and the Time Traveler are perhaps the two best known time travelers although the Connecticut Yankee might be up there.
Poul Anderson is insufficiently recognized even though:
his many time travelers are worthy successors of the original Time Traveler;
his Danellians and their Time Patrol are infinitely superior to the isolationist Time Lords and their two renegades, the Doctor and the Master;
his Patrol timecycles are like mass produced, streamlined later models of Wells' nineteenth century contraption;
his temporal corridors, psychic time travel and quantum fluctuations in space-time-energy are original contributions to time travel fiction;
his Time Patrol series seamlessly synthesizes science fiction with historical fiction;
he surpasses Wells in future history, Stapledon in cosmological sf and both in output;
he presents Odin in heroic fantasies, an original of Odin in a historical novel and a time traveler mistaken for Odin in a Time Patrol story;
he develops and dramatizes the paradoxes that Wells avoided and presents wars through time without glaring contradictions.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with most of what you wrote here. My caveat is merely to wonder if it is even possible to mankind to evolve or change any further in any major ways. Possibly some fairly straight forward changes using genetic modifications to improving health and eliminating certain kinds of diseases. But nothing major or so fundamentally DIFFERENT as to change the human race into another species.
I recall Poul Anderson discussing similar ideas in an essay of his I read. Including his skepticism about evolution DRASTICALLY changing the human race. But, I certainly don't object to him and other SF writers using such ideas! When done well, they can make for fascinating speculations.
Sean
The basic reason for doubting drastic evolutionary changes in humans is that culture changes faster than biology.
Human beings can pretty well totally revise their cultural matrix in about 75 years, three generations. It takes much longer than that to change biology.
A change in the environment is therefore liable to be dealt with culturally before biological evolution has a chance to address it.
This is not a universal rule. For instance, until recently it was very difficult for cultural/behavioral responses to deal effectively with infectious disease, because nobody knew what really caused diseases, and so you get strong regional differences in genetic disease resistance, and strong differences over time.
But that's no longer true. In developed countries most people die of the degenerative conditions of old age, well past their reproductive spans, so infectious disease is no longer exerting selective pressure.
Likewise, vulnerability to alcohol addiction has a genetic component, and it's more common in cultures that haven't been exposed to alcohol -- the most resistant are groups like Middle Easterners, whose ancestors have been farmers (and therefore fermenters) for longest.
There are borderline cases.
For instance, most human beings can't digest raw milk; adult lactose tolerance arose in post-neolithic, animal-using cultures several times by mutation, which was strongly selected for because milch animals can turn inedible vegetation into a very concentrated food and do so consistently.
But the only reason this could arise is that some humans domesticated animals -before- they developed lactose tolerance and started using dairy products -before- the mutation.
They did this by cultural adaptation; because lactose-intolerant people can eat many -processed- dairy products, because the processing breaks down the complex chains in the milk into much simpler stuff we can all digest easily.
So I doubt we're very different in terms of the genetics affecting our behavioral capacities from our ancestors say 50,000 years ago, or at any time since the emergence of "behaviorally modern" h. sapiens sap. (Which is much more recent than the development of the modern human body form and brain size, by the way.) Modern behaviors probably -did- require evolutionary reorganization of the brain.
But apart from that, no.
Eg., the most isolated human beings, Australian aborigines, were isolated for a very long time, were always pure hunter-gatherers, and have besides a relatively high percentage of "archaic" DNA (from Neanderthals, Denisovans and an as-yet unidentified archaic species).
But they show the full range of modern behaviors and adapt easily enough to modern cultures.
And all this information should influence how sf writers think about future evolution.
Kaor, Paul!
But both the essay by Anderson I read (note to self, make sure I still have it and reread) and Stirling's comments argues against the human physical form NEEDING to undergo any drastic evolutionary changes. Not when the human mind can use culture and technology for changing the environment in which people live to suit their needs.
Sean
However, I anticipate a lot of -artificial- evolution in the next century or two. We're just on the verge of being able to routinely alter our stem genetics -- the CRISPR technology is probably the basic breakthrough, and it's already been used that way in animal testing. Furthermore, we now know a lot about gene expression -- the specifics of lactose tolerance, for instance, and many genetic diseases.
(As an aside, cosmetic gene modification is probably going to be easier than the more serious stuff. I expect a lot more people who look like Kate Blanchett and Chris Hemsworth.)
When people -can- do this sort of thing they -do- take advantage of it. A crude early form is prenatal scanning for genetic defects (or in some places, gender).
Intervention at a much earlier, pre-conception level will be seized on even more eagerly.
Some will resist it, of course, but someone somewhere will do it if there's a demand, and there will be -- it's very hard to put genies back in bottles. It's like trying to sweep back the ocean with a broom; much fury and effort, little accomplished.
(Eg., the use of surrogate mothers to incubate fertilized ova has proven impossible to suppress; people just go to another country if the laws in their own are restrictive -- and genuine artificial wombs, like those prevalent in Bujold's "Barrayar" series, are now on the horizon.)
Dear Mr. Stirlng,
I agree, genetic modifications, for both trivial and serious reasons, are going to happen, despite my uneasiness at what some of the results will be.
Cosmetic gene modification? Shades of the "biosculpting" we see in Anderson's Terran Empire stories!
I was already aware of the notion of using artificial wombs. Which I first came across many years ago in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's (was there a third co-author?) novel OATH OF FEALTY. And the Zacharians of Anderson's THE GAME OF EMPIRE used artifical wombs to bring to term babies they deemed "unfit" for their purposes (which was better than abortion!).
Sean
Sean,
OATH OF FEALTY was just Niven & Pournelle but there were later tripartite collaborations with Steve Barnes.
Paul.
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