Fiction And Non-Fiction

Fiction and non-fiction are two such different kinds of writing. This blog focuses on Poul Anderson but let's get Isaac Asimov out of the way first. Asimov progressed from science fiction reader to science fiction writer to science writer, then back to science fiction writer, producing his later Robots and Empire novels which are nowhere near as effective as Poul Anderson's Technic History. In fact, Asimov almost shows us how not to write a future history series. If we were to be shown the younger Hari Seldon, then we should have seen him as a mathematics student on his home planet with no thought as yet of a science to be called psychohistory just as Anderson shows us Adzel as a student on Earth with no preliminary hint that this, so far, junior character is to become the planetologist in Solar Spice & Liquors' first trade pioneer crew. No text should blatantly present itself as primarily a "prequel" to a previously published work. In The Early Asimov, Asimov's earliest published stories alternate with lengthy autobiographical passages that are more interesting than the stories. (Fran Cobden enthusiastically agreed - "Exactly!" - when I said this.)

Maybe the two kinds of writing could be brought together in a collection of alternating stories and articles with the stories dramatizing the issues raised in the articles and the articles discussing the issues raised in the stories? Dramatization and discussion are the main distinguishing features. (Greek drama originated by the addition of extra speakers, then of actions, to ritual narrations.) A non-fiction writer directly addresses his readers whereas fiction is mediated through an omniscient narrator and one or more viewpoint characters.

There can also sometimes be an apparently unbridgeable gap between fiction and non-fiction. Thus, Anderson dramatized the effects of time dilation on a spaceship crew in his novel, Tau Zero, then later discussed time dilation in the essay, "Our Many Roads to the Stars," which - maybe only for reasons of space? - did not refer to the novel. It was as if there was an unwritten rule that Anderson as science popularizer must not refer to Anderson as sf writer. Of course this is not the case. The essay begins by referring to sf in general and also mentions Frederik Pohl's "starbow."

Anderson wrote:

non-fiction about thermonuclear war and several works of fiction set during the aftermaths of nuclear wars;

both fiction and non-fiction about space travel and extraterrestrial intelligence.