Again Heinlein And Anderson

The previous post again prompts reflection on how Poul Anderson succeeds and supersedes Robert Heinlein.

"Life-Line" was:

Heinlein's first published work of fiction;

published by John W. Campbell in Astounding, August 1939;

the opening story of his Future History;

set in 1951 -

- and, although not a time travel story, it presented a temporal paradox.

Thus, this single short story prefigures much. Heinlein wrote the Future History; Anderson wrote eight future histories. Heinlein wrote three works about the circular causality paradox; Anderson wrote three works about that paradox and a series about both causality paradoxes. Anderson's culminating future history, Genesis (2000), re-presents the Frankensteinian theme on a Stapledonian scale.

Heinlein and beyond.

(And what a half-century to have lived through. I was born in '49.)