Multicellular organisms and intelligence have had to re-evolve since the Slaver period. What would a man or a kzin find if he were to emerge from stasis three billion years hence? Would intelligence have had to re-evolve again or would it have continued to develop for three billion years? Poul Anderson's Genesis shows post-organic intelligences billions of years hence but that is in a history without FTL.
Poul Anderson described space combat as if he were a veteran whereas Larry Niven preferred to franchise the Man-Kzin Wars period. Thus, many Known Space volumes are not by Niven. In fact, only ten of the volumes are written by Niven and only by Niven without a collaborator. This is perhaps the biggest single difference between these two future histories.
2 comments:
Poul was good at getting in the heads of people who'd had experiences he lacked. I've never been in combat(*) but I was raised among veterans, which helps; so does rigorous research.
But in the end you just have to have the ability to project yourself into another's experience and life.
(*) though I've had people try to kill me.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: It says something about both the power of the US and the basic stability of Western nations in general, but I've never (yet) come across people TRYING to kill me. I doubt a civilian like me would do at all well in that kind of situation!
Both: I agree Poul Anderson was very good at getting into the heads of many different kinds of people. Including those he would emphatically disagree with and oppose. In fact, there are very few truly BAD persons among his villains (including even Aycharaych).
And Mr. Stirling excelled in creating SMART villains we would do very well to take very, very seriously if they were real! People like Gwen Ingolfsson, Count Ignatieff, William Walker, Adrienne Breze, Norman Arminger, etc., being some examples. Smart, wily, clever villains who never made the dumb kinds of blunders we saw the Communists and Nazis committing in our real history (basically, taking their ridiculous ideologies seriously).
It's my view as well that Stirling, like Anderson, was also very good at getting into other people's minds.
Ad astra! Sean
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