Interests And Ideas

Why did I decide to become an sf fan blogger and where do I get my ideas from? We do not decide to be interested in anything but find that we are interested in some things as against others. At primary school, I was interested in cowboys and spacemen, not footballers, just like I happened to be male, not female. 

Ideas for new blog posts pop into my head while I am walking around town. Returning home, I have something to post. I appreciate sf ideas but do not originate them. If I did originate any ideas, then I would have a very limited ability to embody them in fictional narratives. It is the writing, not the conceptualization, that is almost all of the work. I did think of the idea of time travelling within a generation ship before I read the idea in Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time. I do not understand how an author like Heinlein or Anderson plots a circular causality narrative. At what point in the causal circle does he begin to imagine and think about it?

A hypothetical sequel to There Will Be Time might feature not time travellers within generation ships but faster than light spaceships because FTL is meant to be mathematically equivalent to pastward time travel although I don't see how.

There Will Be Time is a classic of time travel and the attached cover image does it justice. Time Patrollers inhabit a completely different timeline.

Another Future Historian

Two Points of Comparison between Poul Anderson and CJ Cherryh (scroll down)

(i) Both are future historians. I have tried but failed to get into Cherryh's future history series but don't let me discourage anyone else from trying. Better men than me are well into Cherryh's series.

(ii) Just as Anderson has contributed to some other authors' fictional universes (see here), Cherryh has done likewise at least once. Furthermore, her contribution has been to Superman which I have said that I would have liked Anderson to have done. (See here.) From what I remember, Cherryh, like Maggin, conveys some sense of what it would be like to fly at super-speed. However fantastic the content, a novelist, working only with words, must present not only visual descriptions but also the characters' points of views.

Anderson presents fliers  (Ythrians) and mermen.

Contributions To Other Series

Combox discussion persuades me that Poul Anderson's contributions to other authors' fictional universes could be collected in three volumes:

(i) his three Man-Kzin Wars stories;

(ii) his Conan novel;

(iii) his single War World story and his single Berserker story.

(iii) has to be split up when its contents are collected as parts of their series.

Thus, six works set in four universes, collected in three volumes.

Neil Gaiman's Library of Dreams contains all the books that were never written like Anderson's Draka, Barsoom, Superman and Star Trek novels.