Heinlein And Co

Some passages in Poul Anderson's main future history series, the Technic History, strike me as very Heinleinian. I will return to this theme in a while. 

The four Campbell-edited future historians were:

Robert Heinlein

Isaac Asimov

James Blish

Poul Anderson

I encountered these authors in approximately that order although I am not sure about Anderson. I was seven in 1956 when Anderson's first Nicholas van Rijn story, "Margin of Profit," was published but I had no knowledge of that then. At that time, I liked pictures of men in spacesuits in comic strips or, less frequently, on TV and preferred them to men on horseback or in military uniform. Many of my contemporaries preferred footballers. What determines early preferences?

From 1956 to 1960, I was at a small boarding school in Scotland. From 1960 to 1967, I was at a large boarding school in the Republic of Ireland. I live in England. In Scotland, I saw a boy reading a large format omnibus collection of several juvenile adventure novels, illustrated. A second boy was looking over the first boy's shoulder and saying, "That's ridiculous!" Intrigued, I looked and saw that the object of his ridicule was illustrations of aliens. Even more intrigued, I subsequently borrowed the book and read that story which was called Starman Jones. Presumably the author's name was displayed but authors' names meant nothing to me that far back.

Early in the 1960-'67 period, I found in a Public Library the Gollancz edition of Orphans Of The Sky by Robert Heinlein and was intrigued by its at that time unique environment. Generalizing from a single instance, I imagined that this guy, Heinlein, had written only a few books that were short but of high quality, the exact opposite of the truth. Next came - I am not sure in which order - the Pan paperback edition of The Man Who Sold The Moon, thus an introduction not only to Heinlein's Future History but also to the idea of a future history series, and a Public Library copy of Starman Jones by Robert Heinlein. At last I connected that title with that author.

Early in the 1960-'67 period, having noticed that there were adult paperback novels with spacemen, aliens and robots on the covers, I decided to buy some, not sure whether I would like them. I chose two by different authors:

The Caves Of Steel by Isaac Asimov;

The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester.

At an airport, while returning to school in Ireland, I saw Earthman, Come Home by James Blish, a new name, read the blurb and bought the book because I was intrigued by the idea of cities flying through interstellar space. Also during that period, I bought and read After Doomsday by Poul Anderson. I do not think that that was my first Anderson but do not remember what was. He was making less impression than the others as yet but that would eventually change big time.