In the works of a prolific sf writer, we recognize what have become standardized aspects of fictional futures in different combinations. The Star Fox has parallels with the Technic History. There is antisenescence. Gunnar Heim grew up on a colony planet where with alien friends he sailed to an island and made a campfire. On Earth, he is invited to hunt in a game preserve in British Columbia. These sound like events in the lives of Nat Falkayn and Dominic Flandry. However, they are really just background details that will not much affect the action of the novel which will mainly be in space.
Heim growling at his teenage daughter is a less frequent aspect of such works. In Anderson's Operation Otherworld, the hero and heroine meet, marry and have a baby who becomes a teenager and is an adult in A Midsummer Tempest but this amount of family life is unusual.
Heim and his daughter live in San Francisco like how many other Anderson characters?
6 comments:
Research was harder when Poul was writing, and he knew the Bay Area well.
These days you can get thousands of photographs of most places very easily.
Kaor, Paul!
Besides what Stirling said, some of the most prominent SF writers I grew up lived in California, before it became the catastrophic wreck it now is. So having characters and scenes set in CA became rather predictable.
I was gratified Stirling set his three Nantucket books and parts of the Emberverse series in New England.
Ad astra! Sean
Similarly I rather liked Poul setting bits of his stories in the Calgary & Banff area, or Robert J. Sawyer setting much of the action of the Hominids series in the Sudbury Ontario area.
Kaor, Jim!
Perhaps in ORION SHALL RISE? Alas, not familiar with Sawyer's works.
Ad astra! Sean
Also in "The Avatar" there is a scene with two characters in a canoe on Lake Louise, before start of the trip through multiple T-machines.
In the "Hominids" series people in an alternate history earth are doing an experiment in quantum computing in the location corresponding to the Sudbury Neutrino Observatory, which opens a connection between the alternate earths.
The location for both scientific experiments is chosen because it is geologically stable, and very low radiation because of km of low radioactivity rock stopping cosmic rays.
Kaor, Jim!
So much I should reread or read!
Ad astra! Sean
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