Futures Reassess Pasts

HG Wells wrote history and future history: An Outline Of History and The Shape Of Things To Come are almost companion titles.

Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men and Last Men In London are companion volumes. The first is a future history and the second is one Last Man's assessment of past history.

Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years combines historical sf with future history. As in James Blish's Cities In Flight, future history ceases to be generational when the characters become immortal but centuries continue to elapse nevertheless.

Anderson's Genesis summarizes past history before proceeding into a remote future. And that future restores primordial themes when a member of the new human race, perceiving artificial intelligences as gods and wizards, embarks on a Quest to help one AI against another. Meanwhile, the Terrestrial AI "emulates" (consciously simulates) historical periods and alternative histories.

Anderson's complete works include many historical fictions and fictional futures and several alternative histories.

According to Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's "The Asteroid Queen," Marx, Charlemagne, Hitler and Brennan (the Belter who became a protector) were all members of the same ancient, secret, world-controlling Brotherhood. Not in our timeline! And maybe not in the Known Space timeline either? The Brotherhood suppresses knowledge and propagates:

"...slanted versions of past, present, and future." (Man-Kzin Wars V, p. 26) -

- so maybe it lies to itself about its own past?

Earlier Empires

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, Ythrians and Merseians get the hyperdrive from Terrans who invented it independently. However, it is known that there was a previous star traveling race and we learn that they were the telepathic Chereonites. How many such earlier races are there in sf? No doubt many. I think that there was a previous civilization in Ursula K Le Guin's future history although that is one that I have neither read recently nor reread.

We will refer to one other work by Anderson, four by Blish and one by Niven. In Anderson's After Doomsday, the FTL drive spreads like dandelion seeds among many intelligent species. It is not known whether it was discovered once or many times or by whom.

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, there have been four great civilizations in the Milky Way:

I ?;
II the Vegan Tyranny;
III the Earthman culture;
IV the Web of Hercules.

In Blish's Jack Loftus novels, the Heart Stars empire is much older than humanity and the energy beings called "Angels" knew several previous interstellar civilizations in other galaxies. (Blish, like Anderson, goes intergalactic a few times.) In Blish's "This Earth of Hours," the Terrestrial Matriarchy comes into conflict with an ancient telepathic Central Empire whereas, in his "A Style In Treason," High Earth's adversary, the Green Exarch, draws tithes from six fallen empires older than man.

In Larry Niven's Known Space History, the now extinct Thrintun ruled the galaxy three billion years ago and, like the Chereionites, left a telepathic legacy.

Some More Comparisons

Starting from Poul Anderson's eight (or nine) future histories, we have moved sideways in fictional time, finding interesting parallels with future history series by several other sf writers. Much of this discussion stays here on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog because this is where it starts and because this is where page viewers come to. However, for further discussion of other future histories, please see the James Blish Appreciation and Science Fiction blogs, both linked to this one.

Here is another set of comparisons:

(i) In James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, state security and secrecy stifle science whereas Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium goes even further by suppressing technologies with military applications, thus killing most research.

(ii) In Cities..., the USSR takes over the US whereas the CoDominium is a US-USSR alliance. I wondered where all the nationalism came from. It is a reaction against CD world domination. Blish's Bureaucratic State and its thought police go on to ban even fictional references to spaceflight as Unearthly Activities.

(iii) The CoDominium is succeeded by two interstellar Empires of Man. The Bureaucratic State is succeeded by some interstellar empires but mainly by the interstellar economy of the flying cities.

(iv) The CoDominium History culminates in First Contact with aliens whereas Cities... culminates in the mutual annihilation of two universes and the creation of several more:

"Creation began."
-James Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), p. 596.

(v) Returning to our main man, Anderson shows cosmic beginnings in "Flight to Forever," Tau Zero and The Avatar whereas Pournelle concentrates on militarism - not an inherently science fictional theme.

Isolated Planets

How likely are faster than light interstellar travel and a galaxy full of habitable but uninhabitable planets for human beings to colonize? I think that both ideas are extremely unlikely. However, these improbable premises underlie two standard sf scenarios:

an interstellar civilization or "Empire";

a post-Imperial period during which colonized extrasolar planets, isolated for several generations, are gradually rediscovered and recivilized by the few worlds that have retained or regained the capacity for interstellar travel.

This second scenario, Star Trek without the absurdity of identically humanoid beings independently evolved on innumerable planets, exists in:

Isaac Asimov's Second Foundation;
James Blish's Cities In Flight;
the Long Night and Allied Planets periods of Poul Anderson's Technic History;
Jerry Pournelle's A Spaceship For The King, expanded as King David's Spaceship.

Poul Anderson describes fictional planets in detail and always makes clear that human colonists would require dietary supplements, imported ecologies, biological readjustments etc. Another planet is not just another continent.

Why Empires?

Why are there so many interstellar "Empires" in American sf? Notable examples are the works of Poul Anderson, Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, Frank Herbert, H Beam Piper and Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. Although James Blish's Cities In Flight features an interstellar "Hruntan Empire," the main emphasis of this series is on trade by the flying cities.

Empires resonate with much past Terrestrial history. The word "empire" evokes a realm both vast and powerful - although also oppressive and militaristic. It seems both implausible and unimaginative as a future form of social organization.

Poul Anderson wrote well about interstellar empires, then moved on to other kinds of fictional futures. "The Star Plunderer" makes the founding of the Terran Empire by Manuel Argos seem plausible and the Dominic Flandry novels make interstellar Imperial administration seem credible.

Greg Bear wrote:

"...Rome has been much abused. Lay off Rome for a while. And give me no spaceships in feudal settings...unless, of course, you are Poul Anderson, but you are most likely not."
-Greg Bear, "Tomorrow Through The Past" IN SFWA Bulletin, Fall 1979, pp. 38-41 AT pp. 40-41.

I agree that Poul Anderson made even feudalism with spaceships work. I can accept Niven and Pournelle's Empire of Man as part of a literary tradition and as the setting for their First Contact novel but sf must move on, as Anderson did.

Uniqueness

My two favorite kinds of science fiction are time travel and future history series: Wells and Heinlein.

Time Travel
There are two fundamental premises: the past either can or cannot be changed. Poul Anderson systematically examines both. In The Corridors Of Time and There Will Be Time, rival groups wage war throughout an immutable timeline by changing the significance of known events whereas, in the Time Patrol series, an organization prevents change in a mutable timeline.

Future History Series
Robert Heinlein wrote one Future History, although five early Scribner Juveniles share a background with each other and with the "Green Hills of Earth" period of the Future History. Thus, these five novels might count as a "Juvenile Future History."

James Blish wrote a four novel future history, Cities In Flight, a four story future history, The Seedling Stars, and the non-linear Haertel Scholium containing three distinct future historical sequences.

Larry Niven has the Known Space and the State/Smoke Ring histories.

I think that other future historians have one series each except Anderson who has at least eight. I am here counting the single novel, Genesis, as a series because its successive chapters cover geological ages. Anderson moves away from histories with FTL, aliens and interstellar empires towards histories with STL, no aliens and human/AI interactions.

These thorough treatments of time travel and future histories make Anderson unique among sf writers.

Flying Mountains

In Larry Niven's and Jerry Pournelle's The Mote In God's Eye (London, 1959), an asteroid is described as a "...flying mountain." (p. 159) This evokes yet another Poul Anderson future history, although not one of the sequence of seven: Tales Of The Flying Mountains.

In ...Mountains, as in James Blish's Cities In Flight future history, space technology is based on control of gravity although in this case such technology facilitates asteroidal colonization but does not lead to an FTL drive.

I identified six future historical themes:

(i) near future technological advances and social changes;
(ii) a period of interplanetary travel;
(iii) an FTL drive;
(iv) extrasolar colonization;
(v) interstellar imperialism;
(vi) the rise and fall of civilizations -

- while acknowledging that not every future history addresses all of these themes. In fact, ...Mountains can alternatively be summarized as follows:

(i) and (ii) as above;
(iii) an STL drive;
(iv) the first extrasolar colonists still in flight.

...Mountains focuses on (ii) the interplanetary period and thus parallels:

Heinlein's The Green Hills Of Earth;
Asimov's I, Robot;
Blish's They Shall Have Stars;
Niven's Lucas Garner/Gil the Arm stories.

Anderson's other future histories also diverge from the (i)-(vi) model by omitting (iii) FTL and (v) interstellar imperialism.

Origins Of Science

See Heraclitus here and James Blish's After Such Knowledge here.

Beginning to reread ASK Vol I, Doctor Mirabilis, I find a somewhat obscure but also profound reference to Heraclitus:

"Though Heraclitus had never been able to put his foot twice into the same river, he had never been in any doubt about which was the river and which was the foot (one was cold, one got cold; but how in memory could he trust the order of these events, one being - secondary - used to judge the primary other?); everything changed, but only to remain more and more perfectly the same, like the River Meander which cut new banks and channels every year to maintain that clear, fixed, Platonic word of which the river in flux could never be more than a shadow."
-James Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 48-49)

(Should "...Platonic word..." read "...Platonic world..."? I will consult another edition.)

Again:

"...the Heraclitean river - not the Yeo, but a much more drastic Meander - flowed in an underground torrent beneath Yeo Manse too, as under all things else.
"As that river flowed on inexorably, the morning grew older..." (p. 49)

The Heraclitean river is time and it is Roger Bacon that contemplates it. Bacon, studying Aristotle and peering through glass into a cat's eye (p. 25), is a precursor of science, thus of science fiction, thus of sf characters like Anderson's psychotechnicians and Fr Axor, Blish's Jovian Bridge gang and Fr Ruiz Sanchez. John Amalfi in Blish's Cities In Flight refers to Bacon as the inventor of scientific method. Thus, Doctor Mirabilis is a prequel to all science fiction.

To continue this thread, see here.

Films

A visit to the cinema can simultaneously update us on several familiar series. The other day:

a showing of Star Wars VII;

trailers for Star Trek, Captain America and X Men;

a poster advertising Batman v Superman.

While watching Star Wars, I tried to imagine that we were instead watching a film dramatization of Poul Anderson's The Day Of Their Return. In fact, imagine a serial adaptation of the entire History of Technic Civilization from "The Saturn Game" to "Starfog." There would have to be two actors for Dominic Flandry because he changes his face by biosculp between his second and third novels. Earlier, I posted suggestions for filming two small parts of the Technic History. See here and here.

The Star Trek and Star Wars series prove that hard sf series like Anderson's Technic History or James Blish's Cities In Flight could be filmed without encountering any insuperable technical difficulties. So let's see it.

(See here and here for discussion of proposed films based on works by Blish.)

Into 2016

We have passed 1984, 2000 and 2001. The next significant year is 2018 from James Blish's Cities In Flight.

This blog focuses on Poul Anderson and related writers. The blog's contents clearly demonstrate that such a focus is far from narrow. At this time of year, I receive Christmas and birthday (1 Jan) presents that include other reading. However, such is the range of issues covered by Anderson's works, that it is usually possible to connect his works to that other reading (see here and here). The book about surveillance and social control also recalls SM Stirling's Draka: permanently militarized groups regarding force as the only reliable way to ensure their own survival and to maintain social control.

My agenda for 2016 includes:

to read The infinite Voyage by Poul Anderson;
after a welcome break, to return to the violent story of the Draka.

Will there be any significant publishing events in 2016, like -

a Baen Books Complete Psychotechnic History?
a Complete Works Volume I?

Comparisons With James Blish

See here.

Poul Anderson had to grow on me. When I started to read prose science fiction in the early 1960's, I was very impressed with James Blish's Earthman, Come Home, not yet knowing that it was one volume of a kind of series called a "future history." Blish became my top sf writer. Later, when I had read the rest of Cities In Flight, I thought that it was much better than either Robert Heinlein's Future History or Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy. I did not yet compare it with any series by Anderson because I did not as yet know that Dominic Flandry was the hero of a series, still less that that series covered just one period of an even longer future history. When I did learn of the History of Technic Civilization, it took me a while to realize that there was a lot more to it than just a van Rijn series and a Flandry series strung together.

(It was inappropriate to compare the Cities In Flight tetralogy with the Future History. The former holds up well as a future history until somewhere in Vol III, Earthman, Come Home, but by then the antiagathics are keeping a small group of characters alive for centuries so that the reader loses any sense of historical process and is occasionally surprised to be told how much time is elapsing.

(The Future History is effectively a tetralogy because its concluding fifth volume is a brief coda that does not progress the fictitious historical narrative. But Volumes I-IV have almost no continuing characters, instead sharing common background references, with the events of earlier stories becoming the historical past of later stories.)

Blish's major works, which could be collected in just four omnibus volumes, comprise:

two future histories, Cities In Flight and The Seedling Stars;
one non-linear sf sequence, the Haertel Scholium;
one theological trilogy, After Such Knowledge.

His Hugo award winning sf novel, A Case of Conscience, is both a Haertel overdrive novel and Volume III of After Such Knowledge, whereas Volumes I and II are a historical novel and a contemporary fantasy, respectively.

Those familiar with Poul Anderson's works will recognize several parallels:

hard sf;
more than one future history;
historical fiction;
fantasy;
theological concerns -

- and one major difference, unfortunately a much smaller output from Blish.

The Future History Of Eon

Greg Bear, Eon (London, 2002).

In April 2005, Patricia Vasquez reads Brief History of the Death by Abraham Damon Farmer (2135), Chapter One: From December 1993 to May 2005.

According to the Brief History, there will be a catastrophe the following month. Patricia reads that, in the 1980's and early 1990's, the Soviet Union was losing its technological, and therefore also ideological, competition with the US. This contrasts with James Blish's earlier Cities In Flight future history in which, by tightening its security, the US became more like the USSR until there was no difference and the latter absorbed the former in the Spenglerian Fall of the West.

The Brief History states that "...the Agatha experiments..." (p. 102) were an exception to the centralization of Russian computer systems. What were the Agatha experiments? I googled this phrase in inverted commas and all that came up was a reference to Eon by Greg Bear.

I think that the Brief History warrants further study but it is time for me to turn in.

Spaceship Stories

How many science fiction (sf) stories begin as a spaceship approaches, or has just reached, an unknown planet? Many entire series have existed on this basis, most obviously Star Trek. James Blish not only adapted Star Trek episodes as short stories but also, more importantly, wrote several original "spaceship stories," including the Cities In Flight Tetralogy, described by Charles Monteith of Faber and Faber, speaking at a Memorial Evening for James Blish, as "...in many ways, a higher and greater Star Trek."

Poul Anderson wrote every kind of sf, including "spaceship stories." I am currently contemplating the "bookends" of his History of Technic Civilization, i.e., the first four and last four works in the series:

"The Saturn Game"
"Wings of Victory"
"The Problem of Pain"
"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson"

"A Tragedy of Errors"
The Night Face
"The Sharing of Flesh"
"Starfog"

Seven spaceship stories and one, "How To be Ethnic...," about a young man still on Earth just beginning spacefarer training. These stories:

either precede or succeed the major historical processes of the series;

present space travelers' adventures in widely different spatial volumes and historical periods.

"The Saturn Game" takes place about 2055 in the outer Solar System whereas "Starfog" begins five thousand years later near the northern verge of another spiral arm and its action then moves to beyond the Dragon's Head Nebula where no one, except the mysterious Kirkasanters, has been before.

That, unfortunately, is as far as the Technic History takes us. 

Thermonuclear Warfare And James Blish

I found passages in Poul Anderson's Thermonuclear Warfare (Derby, Connecticut, 1963) that were relevant to four of his fictional works:

Twilight World
"Kings Who Die"
The Psychotechnic History
Planet Of No Return

This passage:

"Many will object that the requirements of an aggressive policy will lead to national regimentation, until we are hardly distinguishable from our opponents." (p. 153)

- is relevant to James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy. In Volume I, set in the early twenty first century, American anti-Communism becomes as repressive as Russian anti-Fascism so that the two systems come to be indistinguishable and are bloodlessly united under a single Premier! - although this Spenglerian Fall of the West is preceded by the escape of a few Westerners from the Solar System in FTL spaceships. Centuries later, the Terrestrial Bureaucratic State falls when anti-gravity is rediscovered and entire cities are able to escape, seeking work among the Colonials.

Thus, this is a future in which thermonuclear war is prevented. The Russians conquer by stealth. Another Blish work, A Case Of Conscience, Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy, presents a different outcome of the Cold War. The arms race leads to a Shelter Race until the entire population lives permanently in subterranean cities where there are Corridor Riots. Anderson discusses shelters in Thermonuclear Warfare but does not suggest permanent life underground.

Anderson hoped that the Soviet Union would be defeated by persistent limited wars whereas instead its inefficient command economy was bankrupted by its self-imposed arms race.

Linear And Non-Linear Future Histories

Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy begins untold thousands or tens of thousands of years in our future. Several later written volumes recount intervening history. After an incoherent time travel scenario, mostly set in other timelines, there is an interplanetary robotic economy, then two phases of extrasolar colonization followed by the growth of the Trantorian Empire that becomes the Galactic Empire.

The Trilogy opens as the twelve thousand year old Empire begins its terminal decline. Hari Seldon's psychohistorical Plan will reduce the interregnum between the First and Second Empires from a predicted thirty thousand years to a mere thousand. The Trilogy covers only the first four centuries of the interregnum. Two subsequent novels add one more century.

Although the series is set so far in our future, human lifespans have not been extended. (By contrast, after the opening volume of James Blish's Cities In Flight future history, the reader does not notice that centuries are elapsing because the anti-agathics preserve a small number of interstellar travelers until the end of the universe - which, however, is brought unexpectedly close to the present for narrative convenience.) Thus, none of Asimov's characters survives for more than a century.

Despite the absence of continuing characters, the Trilogy remains an entirely linear narrative. The Galactic Encyclopedia Foundation on the planet Terminus becomes a Mayoralty, with Traders and Merchant Princes, successively interacting with:

imperial provinces that become independent kingdoms;
the weakened Empire;
the Mule who upsets Seldon's plan;
the hidden Second Foundation that restores the Plan;
the planetary collective consciousness called Gaia that secretly manipulates the Second Foundation;
the immortal telepathic robot, Daneel Olivaw, who is ultimately behind both Seldon's Plan and Gaia and even indirectly the Mule because the latter turns out to have been a rebel Gaian, not after all an individual mutant.

The subsequent novels diverge from the original Plan first by introducing Gaia and secondly by reintroducing Daneel from the first extrasolar colonization period. Despite this divergence in content, the structure remains chronologically linear with each installment a direct sequel to the preceding one. An indefinite number of otherwise independent stories could have been set, for example, in the Traders period but Asimov did not go down that route. Instead, each new installment had to advance the timeline and progress the Plan, although ultimately Daneel's, not Seldon's.

Comments:
extremely far fetched;
more about implausible social manipulators than about credible social developments;
differing from the alternative future history model created by Robert Heinlein and followed by Poul Anderson and Larry Niven.

The Heinlein Model:
several successive historical periods with a number of otherwise independent stories set in each period;
transitions between periods explained either by pivotal stories or by background information in later stories.

Thus:
Heinlein's "If This Goes On -" informs us that the Prophets had seized power and describes their overthrow;
Anderson's "Cold Victory" informs us that the Humanists had seized power and describes their overthrow.

However:
Heinlein devotes several stories to the daily lives of ordinary people on the Moon in the pre-Prophetic period, then two to the changed social conditions in the post-Prophetic period;
to a lesser extent, Anderson shows us daily life on Earth and a colonized asteroid in the pre-Humanist period.

My point, as ever, is that I prefer Anderson's several future histories to Asimov's single future history! Even Anderson's earliest, Psychotechnic, history proves to be more substantial than expected when reread with sufficient attention.

Mature Civilization

Wells' and Stapledon's future histories culminate in mature civilizations. Heinlein's Future History Time Chart culminates in "...the end of human adolescence, and beginning of first mature culture..." (The Man Who Sold The Moon, London, 1964, p. 7), although I dislike Heinlein's idea of that culture in Time Enough For Love.

Asimov's Second Foundation works towards a Second Empire to be based on mental science, not on physical force, but this Plan is superseded by the telepathic robots and their planetary organism working to make the Galaxy a single collective consciousness.

In Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy, history is interrupted by the end of the universe. In Anderson's Psychotechnic History, the Third Dark Ages and the interstellar Empires are followed by a multi-species galactic civilization based on mental science and on individual control of cosmic energy. In Anderson's Technic History, the Terran Empire and the Long Night are followed by the Allied Planets, then by the Commonalty.

Six of these seven future histories express the aspiration towards a saner, better organized society. This aspiration is practicable, not utopian, although we cannot know in advance what such a society will be like. As Arthur C Clarke said, any civilization that has had a high technology for a long time must have solved its problems and resolved its internal conflicts because otherwise it would have destroyed itself long ago.

When there is abundant energy and technology, there will no longer be any need to compete in order to survive, to accumulate wealth, to exercise power or to win prestige although creative competition might continue in other forms.

Twilight World II

Poul Anderson's Twilight World (London, 1984) (the publication date of this science fiction novel is the title of another) starts with a quotation from Wagner's The Twilight Of The Gods. Its viewpoint character refers to the Ragnarok (p. 8) and to "Der Untergang des Abendlandes..." (p. 6), Oswald Spengler's "Fall of the West."

This recalls James Blish's Cities In Flight Tetralogy which is both Wagnerian and Spenglerian. Blish's Chronology of Cities in Flight even gives a date, albeit agreed and arbitrary, for the Fall of the West: 2100. In that case, an extended Cold War scenario, the West falls to the East because Western, i.e., American, security becomes so increasingly repressive that it is eventually indistinguishable from Russian bureaucracy which therefore simply takes over the running of both systems, banning what had been the crowning Western achievement, space travel.

In Twilight World, the Fall is not bureaucratic resolution of the Cold War but World War III. This leads into a comparison of Anderson's post-apocalyptic scenarios:

The Winter Of The World is post-Ice Age;
Twilight World, Shield and the Maurai History are post-nuclear;
Vault Of The Ages is - I can't remember, but will reread it shortly. 

Length And Brevity

Imagine if Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization comprised only:

a novelization of "The Saturn Game";

a novel and a collection in which the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire co-exist in different parts of the galaxy;

Tau Zero set during the Long Night.

This is my way of comparing the Technic History with James Blish's longest future history, the Cities In Flight Tetralogy. The point here is to contrast length with brevity, not to denigrate Blish. On the contrary, for a very long time, I rated Blish much more highly than Anderson and thought that the Technic History was just the van Rijn and Flandry series strung together with a few extras. I now think instead that it is the best of the Heinleinian future histories - although perhaps there are only three of these, Heinlein's and two by Anderson? In any case, the Technic History is superb, whether it belongs to a large or a small set of future histories.

Cities In Flight just makes it into future historical status but, having recently reread it yet again, I can confidently state that it is a great work of science fiction and that each of its four volumes has unique merits that differentiate it from the others.

Update

I have been away from this blog for a while, first posting on other blogs, then away from computers for most of a week. Rereading and blogging about Poul Anderson got me into rereading and blogging about James Blish and I am still currently focusing on Blish.

The newest post on the James Blish Appreciation blog, "Sequel, Serial, Series," compares Blish (quality), Anderson (both quality and quantity) and Star Trek (much greater quantity but at the expense of quality).

I will probably reread and comment on Blish's The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars before returning to Anderson maybe with Twilight World.

Anderson And Blish

What Poul Anderson and James Blish have in common:

hard sf;
more than one future history series;
a major future history series based on a cyclical theory of history;
fantasy;
historical fiction.

Anderson, of course, shows us the rise and fall of the Polesotechnic League, the rise and fall of the Terran Empire and the rise of the Commonalty. This is all in many works that are collected in seven omnibus volumes.

Blish shows us the Fall of the West in one volume, the rise and fall of Okie society in two volumes and the end of two universes in one volume. This is all collected in a single omnibus volume. Blish's other trilogies and tetralogies plus related matter, including his other future historical works, would fit, I suggest, into another six omnibuses or collections.

Thus, merely in terms of word count, Anderson's longest future history is comparable to the totality of Blish's future histories and similar works. The main difference between these two writers is in quantity of output. Blish wrote one historical novel as against Anderson's five - or more, depending on how we classify those that include an element of historical fantasy without being primarily fantasies.

As previously indicated, I have become absorbed in rereading and blogging about Blish's Cities In Flight, in other words what I have been doing with Anderson for the past year though now with a different but similar author. There really is a lot more in this Blish Tetralogy than I would have thought from previous readings. If you have read all of Anderson and want to read something comparable, knowing that it is similar in quality although less in quantity, then please read some of the works of James Blish.