Past, Present And Future

I have begun to read Rogue Lawyer by John Grisham. How does this connect with Poul Anderson? It may be less evident to American readers, but for someone in the UK, Anderson and Grisham are two fictional windows onto the US. Here, I discussed John Buchan, John le Carre and John Grisham as carrying their readers through modern history from the eve of World War I to the high tech War on Terror. A Grisham novel featuring early twenty first technology reads like sf. Anderson, of course, takes us further into the future(s) but sets some of his sf in the present and also wrote a contemporary detective trilogy.

Both Anderson and Grisham write well and prolifically. Grisham perfects the contemporary American legal thriller whereas Anderson roams through time and the universe. We need fiction about contemporary society and also about our place in the cosmos.

American Fiction

Still no Call Me Joe from Amazon. Meanwhile, I am rereading The King Of Torts by John Grisham. When I started to read Poul Anderson's science fiction as a secondary school pupil in the 1960's, I would have regarded an American legal thriller as mundane by comparison. Now, of course, I know better.

Grisham's DC street lawyers and tort billionaires, like Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn and expeditions to unusual planetary systems, are literary expressions of the dynamic society inhabited by Grisham and Anderson alike. Rich lawyer's private jets flying from Washington to New York in forty minutes are exact equivalents of van Rijn's hyperdrive ships flying between planetary systems faster than light.

Grisham, like Anderson, describes spectacular wealth but values basic humanity. Anderson additionally values knowledge of the universe, with serious scientific speculation about stellar and planetary evolution. We need fiction about contemporary society and also about our place in the cosmos.

That Uncomfortable Pause Between Finishing Reading One Book And Starting To Read Another

What should I read next? I occasionally mention other books read in order to place Poul Anderson in a wider literary context. I have been a John Grisham fan since I saw The Firm on television on a Saturday evening and bought the paperback second hand at a car boot sale on the Sunday afternoon and why did they change plot details and the ending? It is good sometimes to see, e.g., Tom Cruise and Gene Hackman playing particular roles, then to encounter those same characters in their original prose setting. I have just started to read Sycamore Row.

Man-Kzin Wars IV has been dispatched so I will shortly post about Poul Anderson's third contribution to that series. I might then read the rest of that volume and also reread stories by other authors in Volumes I, III and IV although, if I subsequently post about those other Man-Kzin Wars stories, it will be on the Science Fiction blog.

In "Inconstant Star," the kzin, Weoch-Captain, thinks:

"The real mockery came from the stars in the viewport, multitudes and majesty, a hunting ground unbounded. He bared fangs at them. We shall range among you yet, he vowed; we shall do with you what we will." (III, p. 261)

This recalls the Merseian, Brechdan Ironrede:

"'...the highest end of all - absolute freedom for our race, to make of the galaxy what they will.'"
- Young Flandry (New York, 2010), p. 27.

And Ironrede tells his newest grandcub:

"'You shall have stars for toys...Wudda, wudda, wudda.'" (op. cit., p. 28)

But, as when a kzinti admiral invoked the destiny of the race, I am not sure that it is appropriate to make the kzinti sound too similar to Merseians. The latter are indeed long term racial strategists whereas the former are so impulsive and aggressive that they lash out and fight among themselves if they are cooped up in a spaceship without any action for too long. In fact, in this respect, they strain credulity:

"'What they taught us in school. A sapient species doesn't reach space unless the members learn to cooperate. They'll wreck the environment one way or another, war or straight libertarianism or overbreeding...'"
- Niven, Larry, "Madness Has Its Place" IN Niven, Ed, Man-Kzin Wars III (New York, 1990), pp. 3-34 AT p. 14.