Nine more that I forgot:
Isaac Asimov's I, Robot ends with giant robotic brains controlling the global economy for the good of mankind;
Clifford Simak's City ends with post-human intelligent dogs;
James Blish's The Seedling Stars ends when Adapted Men, having spread through the galaxy, now recolonize a changed Earth (see Adapted Men and Adapted Men II);
Blish's Midsummer Century ends after 25,000 A.D. when the time-projected mind of a twentieth century astrophysicist is integrated into a sentient computer as it guides Rebirth V of human civilization after the defeat of the Birds;
Poul Anderson's Twilight World ends when telepaths terraform the outer satellites (see here);
Anderson's Starfarers ends with the beginning of a multi-species interstellar civilization linked by near light speed travel and transtemporal communication (see here);
Anderson's The Corridors Of Time ends at the beginning of the Bronze Age but also with the promise of a peaceful interstellar civilization after the time war between Wardens and Rangers (see here);
Anderson's There Will Be Time ends either with FTL or with mutant time travelers moving along the world-lines of STL interstellar spaceships (see here);
Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years ends when eight immortals agree to explore the universe and to re-meet a million years later.
Again, more by Anderson than by anyone else.
I think that these brief summaries convey the range of imagination of the authors concerned. Even the composition of a summary requires selection, e.g., in the previous post, I said merely that Tales of The Flying Mountains covered part of a future because I was contrasting it with works that covered the entire future. However, I omitted its content, i.e., that this volume ends with the beginning of interstellar travel and extra-solar colonization.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What you said about Anderson's TALES OF THE FLYING MOUNTAINS reminded me of some of Robert Zubrin's suggestions in his THE CASE FOR SPACE. That is, the first colonies settled from Earth will in time themselves send out colonists, as the wealth and means necessary for doing so is accumulated on Mars and the asteroid belt. Which is what we see the asterites of TALES doing in the Interludes and final story of that collection.
We should keep in mind as well possible successors of Anderson and Stirling. I've been seeing good things said about a young SF writer named Jon Del Arroz, altho I have yet to read any of his stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I forgot to add that only one of Blish's "Seedling Stars" stories I read was "Surface Tension," which, while certainly enjoyable to read, has to be difficult to "suspend one's disbelief" when seriously examined. That is, how can human beings be MINIATURIZED and still be intelligent?
Ad astra! Sean
Poul did get things wrong occasionally.
Eg., the extreme shortage of metals in the Maurai future, referenced THERE WILL BE TIME as well as the dedicated stories collected in MAURAI AND KITH.
The thing is that the depletion of huge deposits like Mesabi or Kiruna or Labrador by industrial civilization doesn't affect the small-scale iron ore sources typically used in pre-Industrial Revolution times.
So those Mexican city-state people in his story with the "Canyon" raiders arriving in blimps shouldn't be so short of iron that they have to rework ornamental wrought-iron screens or use stone tools and fire-hardened lances.
We stopped using small-scale, scattered iron ore deposits because of economics, not because they're exhausted. Gathering them would be too expensive for steel mills that produce millions of tons.
But on the pre-industrial level of local ironworks and blacksmiths, there's plenty of iron to produce a few pounds a head per year for a modest population -- that could go on for literally millions of years.
Those deposits are ubiquitous: iron isn't a rare metal. It's much more common than copper or tin, which is one reason it rapidly supplanted bronze when we learned how to use it.
Incidentally, iron ore is so commonplace that the usual controlling factor in producing iron was not ore, but fuel -- trees for charcoal. In places like England, which were densely settled, charcoal was produced on a sustainable basis by "coppicing", cutting the tree off regularly when the shoots that regrow from its base reach a certain size, which depends on the use (for charcoal, fencing, withes for weaving baskets, etc.)
During the early phases of the Industrial Revolution, England became a major iron importer because places like America and Sweden and Russia could produce iron much more cheaply, because they were thinly populated and had more trees.
It was the discovery of how to use coal (by "cooking" out the impurities that contaminated the iron) that allowed iron production on an industrial scale to take off.
Being a non-technical type, I just had no idea that history was full of all these details.
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