Saturday 5 September 2020

War World

Larry Niven's Known Space future history series has a shared/franchise universe period called Man-Kzin Wars. Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium future history series has a shared/franchise universe period called War World. Samey.

What concerns us here is that Poul Anderson contributed to both of these sub-series. We might also be interested in the War World stories by, e.g., SM Stirling and Harry Turtledove.

In Poul Anderson's collected complete works, maybe his Man-Kzin Wars tetralogy would comprise one volume and his contributions to other shared universes would fill one other?

Fictional universes that it would have been good if Anderson had contributed to:

Barsoom etc - Anderson would have been able to rationalize some of ERB's absurdities;

Superman - rationalization of Kryptonian superpowers;

SM Stirling's Draka - maybe an optimistic story ending with a hint of how the Draka might be overthrown?;

Doctor Who - making sense of the Time Lords' time travel.

What can an author do who inherits a logically impossible plot line? When Alan Moore re-created Swamp Thing, he made us realize that this was not a man who had become a plant but a plant that thought that it had been a man. When Moore re-created the British superhero, Marvelman, he consigned all previous Marvelman stories to a virtual reality that had been used to test the character's responses, including how much absurdity he could be induced to accept. The adult Michael Moran dreams of flying but cannot remember his magic word in Margaret Thatcher's Britain...

Fiction reflects reality. Reality can invade fiction...

3 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

I did two spinoff novels for the "Terminator" movie franchise, and believe me, making that plotline plausible was -hard-.

S.M. Stirling said...

My Venus/Mars books, THE SKY PEOPLE and IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS were an attempt to redo the "Old Solar System" of the pulps (Burroughs, Kline, Brackett) as scientifically credible.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

And I loved your LORDS OF CREATION books! And I did read one of your Terminator books. I hope I still have it.

Ad astra! Sean