HG Wells presents time travel, space travel, alien invasion and future history in four separate volumes.
Olaf Stapledon presents these four themes in a single volume which is linked to three other works including a cosmic history!
CS Lewis' Ransom Trilogy and unfinished Ransom novel systematically reply to Wells and Stapledon in terms of these four themes.
Robert Heinlein, James Blish and Poul Anderson each address these four themes.
Another theme related to time travel is alternative histories which Wells also addresses in Men Like Gods and Anderson in several works. Some sf authors specialize, e.g.:
Harry Turtledove in alternative histories;
SM Stirling in alternative histories and time travel.
From the perspective of this blog, it is important to draw attention to the significance of Poul Anderson's contributions, particularly on the themes of time travel and future history but also on the other three themes.
5 comments:
Note that all near-future SF "becomes" an alternate history if you wait long enough!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that's what will happen to Anderson Technic series, esp. after he committed himself to the only date mentioned in that timeline: 2057. The year when an academic paper was pub. at a Lunar university in "The Saturn Game."
Ad astra! Sean
Yes, and I think that's a weakness. The only real way to keep a SF setting from becoming an AH quickly is to put it in the -far- future. When I do near-future stuff, there's always a clue that it's AH anyway!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It never bothered me that series springing from real history, such as Pournelle's Co-Dominium timeline, did not have a real Co-Dominium arising when he said it would. I expect fictions to deviate from real history.
Ad astra! Sean
Yes, but there's a deeper lesson: trying to predict the future is futile, because so much depends on accidents. Such as whether an assassination attempt fails or succeeds, for example.
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