We are still with the inexhaustible subject of future histories and there is more to be said than can be fitted into this lunch break. As ever on this blog, our focus is on Poul Anderson even if we first refer to the earlier Campbell future historians: Heinlein, Asimov and Blish.
Blish's Adolph Haertel discovers antigravity in Welcome To Mars and has invented the first faster-than-light interstellar drive in "Common Time." These are different achievements. See Gyrogavitics. The discoverer of antigrav and the inventor of FTL need not have been given the same name.
Heinlein's Future History, Volume I, The Man Who Sold The Moon, opens with Heinlein's Time Chart, a PREFACE by the author and an INTRODUCTION by John Campbell. None of these three texts, with the partial exception of the Time Chart, is a fictional introduction written as from a future historical perspective whereas Asimov has Encyclopedia Galactica and Blish has Acreff-Monales, The Milky Way: Five Cultural Portraits.
In Anderson's Tales Of The Flying Mountains, a committee, meeting in interludes between the stories, discusses how to teach history and explains to its newest member that teachers must select and interpret facts and raise children to become "'...intellectually trained and emotionally mature...'" (p. 17) adults who can debate interpretations of historical events "'...with pleasure and profit.'" (ibid.)
Early in the second story, "The Rogue," the narrator refers to himself and his readers as "We..." (p. 43) That single pronoun shows that this speaker/author is not the omniscient narrator of most fiction but a counterpart of the narrator in Heinlein's Future History, Volume II, The Green Hills Of Earth, who comes across as the writer of popular magazine articles published during the "Green Hills" period of the Future History.
In haste. Will expand as necessary later.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
As always Anderson inserts cautionary into series when things start to get too idealized. Here I mean what we see in "Recruiting Nation" where the narrator was appalled to discover that the foundation organizing the asteroid/spaceship "Astra" was increasingly forced to accept as crew many persons who were unsatisfactory or outright misfits. That was because, as conditions stabilized in the Asteroid Republic and population grew, more and more misfits of various kinds appeared. Also, as prosperity spread thru out the Republic there was less and less of an incentive for people who were doing well to pull up stakes.
Thus, it's no surprise that we see so many misfits, oddballs, eccentrics, ex-cons, malcontents, etc., being recruited. People who are unhappy or don't feel at home in the Republic would have reasons for leaving.
Ad astra! Sean
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