Other Imaginative Fiction

Appreciating Poul Anderson's works also involves appreciating much other imaginative fiction. Recent posts have mentioned:

HG Wells' Selenites, both their name and their nature;

Rhysling, Dahlquist, the Stones, the Covenant and some other features of Robert Heinlein's Future History;

some of these same features in Heinlein's Scribner Juveniles;

Asimov's Robots;

Arthur C. Clarke's novels of Lunar colonization (does the attached cover image remind you of any Anderson cover?);

multiple aspects of Neil Gaiman's The Sandman;

Doctor Who;

a novel with a forgotten title and author's name.

Remembering an idea or a plot but not who wrote it is a common experience of sf readers and CS Lewis makes two such acknowledgments in his The Great Divorce. An American "Scientifiction" magazine had contained a story in which a traveler to the past found raindrops that pierced him like bullets and sandwiches that he could not bite because, being past, they could not be altered. No need for a Time Patrol then. Also, no possibility of circular causality. But, of course, this "traveler" had not physically entered the past.

"Scientifictionists" also taught Lewis about traveling by changing size. Some sf characters found that nuclei were miniature stars and that their electrons were miniature inhabited planets. James Blish's characters in "Nor Iron Bars" entered a quantum mechanical microcosm but I do not think that Anderson ever trod that particular path.