(However, look for six new posts on four other blogs:
Science Fiction;
Logic of Time Travel;
Personal and Literary Reflections;
Religion and Philosophy.)
This is how I think that these five series could be presented.
In 2 Omnibus Volumes Each
Robert Heinlein's Future History
Volume I ending with indentured servitude on Venus and Nehemiah Scudder's movement growing on Earth...
Questions for Volume II: How will Scudder's theocracy be overthrown and what kind of society will result from its overthrow?
Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History
Volume I ending with the descent of Earth into the Second Dark Ages...
Question for Volume II: when civilization is restored, will the psychotechnic project be resumed?
Anderson's Time Patrol Series
Volume I ending with the arrest of Merau Varagan but not of the last Exaltationists...
Question for Volume II: When the last Exaltationists have been caught, what other problems must the Patrol address?
In 3 Omnibus Volumes Each
Sherlock Holmes (See here)
Volume I ending with Holmes' apparent death.
Volume II: two earlier cases.
Volume III beginning with Holmes' return.
James Bond
Volume I ending with Bond's apparent death.
Volume II: recuperation; last of SMERSH; short stories.
Volume III: SPECTRE, Blofeld and aftermath.
Connections Between These Series
The Psychotechnic History was modeled on the Future History.
The first Time Patrol story is a spin-off from an untold Holmes case.
Bond is referenced in Anderson's non-series time travel novel, The Corridors Of Time.
One More?
I think that, of John Sanders' five Nicholas Pym novels, two (not just one) are set after Oliver Cromwell's death. If so, then this would provide a good basis for two omnibus collections.
Pym launches Henry Morgan as a privateer. Baynes joins Morgan. Some descriptive passages are worthy of Anderson:
"...Pym permitted himself a final glance at the sky and the sea. It was a beautiful sunset, the sky orange and crimson, the sea flecked with gold, except on the black shadow cast by the island."
-John Sanders, The Hat Of Authority (London, 1966), 17, p. 216.
"The sun was a scarlet elipse just touching the emptiness of the Atlantic horizon, and sea birds were wheeling and swooping above his head, mewing annoyance at this unexpected invasion of their secluded sanctuary." (p. 217)
The phrase, "...the hat of authority...," is a quotation. See here.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
One of the annoying lacunae in Heinlein's Future History is how we never see Nehemiah Scudder after he had risen to become the Prophet Ruler of the US. Even tho RAH slotted in the appropriate spot in his famous chart a proposed story called "The Stone Pillow." I think I read somewhere of Heinlein saying he never wrote that story because he disliked Scudder. Understandable, but regrettable.
Heinlein seems to have thought a tyrannical theocracy based on Evangelical Protestantism possibly happening to the US. I have disagreed elsewhere with that idea, for two reasons. First, my belief is Christianity offers only poor and thin soil for theocracy. Second, de Tocqueville argued in DEMOCRACY IN AMERICA that despotism will most likely take the form of the gov't becoming ever more centralized and bureaucratic. And my view is that is far more likely a scenario.
I am annoyed at missing the references to James Bond in THE CORRIDORS OF TIME. At least I did notice the allusions to H.G. Wells in THERE WILL BE TIME!
Interesting that "the hat of authority" came from comments of Cromwell dismissing the title of "king" as merely a gaudy feather in that hat of authority. But the word "king" originally came from the Germanic title for a war chieftain.
Ad atra! Sean
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