As we keep saying, Poul Anderson covers every angle.
In "In Memoriam," the human race becomes extinct very soon.
In "Epilogue," space travelers return to Earth to find that Terrestrial humanity has become extinct but that automatic machinery has evolved, becoming both conscious and intelligent.
In Genesis, humanity, superseded by Artificial Intelligences (AIs), becomes extinct but is re-created by a post-organic intelligence descended from AIs.
In works like the Technic History and World Without Stars, humanity has become too widely dispersed to become extinct very soon.
In After Doomsday, all life on Earth has been destroyed but several single-sex spaceship crews survive and must find each other.
In Tau Zero, a single spaceship crew survives this universe and colonizes a planet in the next universe.
In "Flight to Forever," a single time traveler survives this universe but continues around the circle of time and returns to 1973.
In the Time Patrol series, mankind evolves into the Danellians.
The answers to the opening question are Carl Donnan in After Doomsday and Charles Reymont in Tau Zero.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I think of "Murphy's Hall" as being at least thematically a prelude to "In Memoriam." In "Hall" we see mankind step by step making the wrong choices, a process which can lead too easily to what we see in "In Memoriam."
Anderson was quite capable of writing grim, dystopian stories, as well as hopeful ones.
Ad astra! Sean
Our own species of human is about 300,000 years old; behaviorally modern humans are about 80,000 years old, marked by a steep drop in testosterone levels, which was probably what made modern-style social interactions possible.
So we haven't been around long. Wolves and cats are much older as species.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And we know Homo neanderthalensis survived till about 35,000 years ago. And some relic populations may have lingered somewhat longer. I rather wish both Neanderthals and those Hobbit like hominins on Flores had survived and still be existing now!
We see Neanderthals in Anderson's "The Long Remembering" and a man who was half Neanderthal in "The Nest."
Even tho I know you were simply going by the view common about them in the early 20th century, I regretted how the Neanderthals seen in your THE SKY PEOPLE were shown as brutish and rather stupid. That is no longer the general view of them, after all, as we slowly learned more about them.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment