Lunarians, Exaltationists and Zacharians are three kinds of human beings specially adapted in different ways to live off Earth and each of these groups appears in a different future history series by Poul Anderson. For some purposes, I count the Time Patrol series as a future history because it does present some disjointed information about future events culminating a million years hence in our evolutionary successors. It happens to be a future history that involves time travel and the stories that we read happen to be set in our past, not in the future, but we are told some things about the future like that the Exaltationists will be created and that the Time Patrol will be founded.
The Time Patrol is, at least, a fictional history like the same author's The Boat Of A Million Years, a narrative spanning history and continuing through the present into an interstellar future. Future histories are one kind of fictional history, other examples of the latter being the Middle Earth History, the Chronicles of Narnia and the Bible. (The Bible is not just fiction but it is not just history either.)
I am knocked out by the Proserpinans - Lunarians on Proserpina - but, in the following chapter, we return to Fenn in the inner Solar System and I am out of here until some time tomoz. This evening, I return to rereading John Grisham.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I rather wish we could have seen the Zacharians earlier in the Technic stories. Apparently Anderson only thought of them as he was writing THE GAME OF EMPIRE. And then had to account for why we don't see them "earlier" in the Technic history. His solution to that question being the Zacharians becoming merely another small and obscure ethnicity in a civilization and then Empire containing thousands of them.
Your mention of Middle Earth reminded me of how I'm slowly rereading Tolkien's THE CHILDREN OF HURIN. But I definitely want to soon reread THE GAME OF EMPIRE. I am sorry we don't see any mention of Tolkien's works in the Technic stories. Anderson could have, after all, if he quoted from the Bible and one of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems.
Correct, the Bible is not just fiction, even if I believe some books, like Jonah, are best read as theologizing fictions. It even has a mystery story, that part of the Book of Daniel about Susanna and the Elders.
Ad astra! Sean
The Zacharians are an example of a group with a self-esteem problem... far too much of it...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That sums up the Zacharians much more quickly and pithily than what I was groping for! And then there's my outlandish article "Was the Domination Inspired By Merseia?" in which I implausibly linked the Zacharians to your Draka, among other things. (Smiles)
Ad astra! Sean
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