in James Blish's Welcome To Mars, Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity and flies to Mars;
in Blish's "No Jokes on Mars," Mars is colonized;
in his "Common Time," the Haertel overdrive is tested;
in his "Nor Iron Bars," the Arpe Drive is tested and telepathy is discovered in the microcosm;
in his "This Earth of Hours," the Standing Wave has replaced the two earlier FTL drives and the telepathic Central Empire of the galaxy threatens the Terrestrial Matriarchy just as, in Poul Anderson's Technic History, the Merseian Roidhunate served by the telepathic Aycharaych threatens the Terran Empire -
- similar ideas in different combinations.
The Technic History originated because Anderson connected two previously independent series and some other stories whereas the Haertel Scholium originated because Blish added sequels and prequels to "Common Time," thus generating a non-linear sequence from which I have summarized a linear sub-sequence constituting the trunk of a temporal tree from which other works branch in different directions.
Another feature of future history series is that often there is no direct connection between the opening and closing installments, e.g. "Marius" and "The Chapter Ends" in Anderson's Psychotechnic History; "The Saturn Game" and "Starfog" in his Technic History. In the Haertel Scholium as summarized here, each new installment is linked to one earlier one without any overarching narrative.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the only real reason for linking "Stafog" to the earlier Technic stories was because of Daven Lauren mentioning the League, the Troubles, the Empire, and the Long Night as earlier phases of the history leading to the Commonalty. True, those are convincing links, more so than what can be found in some of the ALLEGED Psychotechnic stories, such as "Star Ship," "The Chapter Ends," etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
And the planet New Vixen plus the fact that the Kirkasanters are descended from Aeneans. Also, there is a reference to ancient Anglic.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And those links you listed made me think of THE REBEL WORLDS, "A Tragedy of Errors," "The Sharing of Flesh," and THE NIGHT FACE. Which is exactly one of the things Anderson wanted his readers to think of.
Ad astra! Sean
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