Every Anderson future history addresses interstellar travel.
The Psychotechnic History
Before the development of the hyperdrive, there was a Heinleinian multi-generation interstellar spaceship.
In the much later Galactic civilization, artificially mutated brains enable individual human beings to control cosmic forces and thus to propel themselves, enclosed in envelopes of air and heat, across thirty thousand light-years in ten days!
(Comic book superheroes.)
The Maurai History
The three Maurai short stories set centuries apart are a short future history of reconstruction on post-nuclear-war Earth with no space travel.
In the long Maurai novel, Orion Shall Rise, interplanetary travel is revived.
The time travel novel, There Will Be Time, incorporates and transcends the Maurai History. Either time travellers travel futureward in slower than light interstellar spaceships or time travel is mathematically equivalent to faster than light travel so that FTL ships can be developed.
A towering and comprehensive imagination.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
No need for me to rehash the objections I have for including "The Chapter Ends" with the Psychotechnic series.
Don't forget how Stirling criticized the Maurai short stories for making metals of all kinds implausibly rare and costly. Which Anderson came to agree with and walked back from in ORION SHALL RISE and the non-Maurai timeline story THE WINTER OF THE WORLD.
Ad astra! Sean
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