Evolution In Aldiss, Anderson, Lewis And Stapledon

Since we concluded the previous post with a quotation from Brian Aldiss, we should additionally mention that Aldiss wrote both a time travel novel and a Frankenstein novel and also that, like Poul Anderson, he followed Robert Heinlein not only by writing a future history but also by linking a generation ship story to the future history. Furthermore, Aldiss' single-volume future history, Galaxies Like Grains Of Sand, has a culminating instalment based on the completely non-Darwinian idea that animal evolution culminated with humanity in this galaxy and will begin with humanity in the next. Not an amoeba but a complete human organism will somehow form.

CS Lewis' Perelandra presents the Christian Fundamentalist idea of (as yet) sinless First Parents created on another planet.

In what I remember of Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Man, a recognizably different human species just began to be born among the population when its time had come. Natural selection was not involved. However, Stapledon did show Darwinian processes operating later in the novel when human colonists of Neptune degenerated into animality and intelligence eventually re-evolved.

Anderson applies fully Darwinian principles when recounting the evolution of Diomedeans, Ythrians and Didonians. See Speculution. Anderson was a hard sf writer who respected religion but who did not lose sight of physics or biology.