SF Dialogues

Science Fiction is a sequence of dialogues.

Interplanetary Exploration
The earlier concept: a few explorers in a single spaceship spend a short time on the surface of another planet before returning to Earth;

Poul Anderson's "The Saturn Game": many scientists and their families spend several years cruising the outer Solar System in a fleet of solar-powered spaceships while small teams descend to planetary surfaces.

A Multi-Generation Interstellar Spaceship
Heinlein: after mutiny and mutations, most of the crew forgets about the outside universe;

Simak: religious enthusiasm keeps the crew performing necessary tasks in their enclosed environment;

Aldiss: life inside a "generation ship" is much more complicated than Heinlein allowed for;

Anderson: an Asimovian science of society might prevent social breakdown in a Heinleinian generation ship.

Time Travel
Authors speculated about the consequences of time travel;
one imagined response was time travelers changing history;
Anderson replied with the Time Patrol, then imagined a deeper cosmic purpose for the Patrol.

Robots
Authors asked whether artificial human beings or robots would destroy their creators;

Asimov replied with the Laws of Robotics, then devised ways round the Laws;

David Brin, one of the continuers of Asimov's Foundation series (see here), had some robots creating Asimov's humans only galaxy by exterminating aliens;

Anderson argued that specialized machines, e.g., self-driving vehicles, make general purpose robots redundant so that the first experimental robot joins the ranks of the unemployed but, unlike the rest of them, cannot escape into drunkenness.

The Future
HG Wells wrote an anthropocentric history of the next two hundred years;

Olaf Stapledon wrote an anthropocentric history of the entire human future, then added a cosmic history;

CS Lewis replied to Wells and Stapledon with a Biblically-based theocentric trilogy;

American future historians continue the tradition of Wells and Stapledon but display different levels of appreciation of religious issues;

one American future historian, James Blish, also wrote a post-Lewis theological trilogy (see here);

regular blog readers will know where Poul Anderson fits in this sequence.

Three Major American Future Histories
Heinlein: a series with some contemporaneous and some successive installments.
Anderson: a series directly modeled on Heinlein's.
Anderson (later): a much longer series comprising not only individual installments but also two lengthy sub-series.

The moral of the story: Anderson is always in there with the best of them.