Thursday, 10 April 2025

Endless Reading

Someone said that Heaven would be endless reading but surely that is wrong? Heaven would be living reality, not reading about it. However, we can imagine an Apollonian hereafter where writers are enabled to achieve their apotheoses. An endless Future History by Robert Heinlein? An endless Technic History and Time Patrol series by Poul Anderson?

It was said that Heinlein gave the future a daily life but this was mainly in his first two volumes and, in any case, could have been extended. More details about life in:

the second half of the twentieth century with technological advances and early interplanetary travel but social decay;

under the Prophets;

under the Covenant;

in the mature culture after the return of the Howards?

(The Future History culminates in Methuselah's Children; Orphans Of The Sky is an appendix.)

Additions to Anderson's Technic History? We have discussed this before and there are many obvious possibilities but here is another, hinted at in the opening story, "The Saturn Game": stories set in the twentieth century but showing the knowledgeable readers how familiar events point towards Technic civilization. 

The Time Patrol potentially covers the whole past and future of Earth.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would also like to think writers enjoying the beatific vision would write using many other scenarios besides either the Future History or the Technic timeline.

Anderson gives us some glimpses of what heaven might be like in OPERATION CHAOS.

Ad astra! Sean