Friday, 5 October 2018

From Sub-Atomic Particles To Ghosts

Recently, the blogging experience has been enriched by comparisons of Poul Anderson's works with:

Robert Heinlein's Future History;
Karel Capek's and Isaac Asimov's robots;
Asimov's future history;
James Blish's Dirac pulses (connecting with the instantaneous interstellar teleportation in Anderson's The Enemy Stars);
CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy.

Some comparisons are unexpected and even surprising. In fact, it has just occurred to me that:

Lewis' Company of Logres receives the revived Merlinus Ambrosius, then Ransom joins Arthur Pendragon and others on Venus;

there is a comparable, albeit technological, return of a legendary figure in Anderson's The Stars Are Also Fire, a return that I had previously compared here with a raising of the dead in Anderson's The Broken Sword.

The broad range of these comparisons displays the broad range of Anderson's works, covering, among many other topics:

future history;
Artificial Intelligence;
nuclear physics;
ghosts.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

To me, some of the strangest of these speculations by Poul Anderson are those relating to AIs and the downloading of human personalities into artificial neural networks. No wonder I had such difficulty getting a grip on his later works!

Sean