Stefan Rostomily

Stefan Rostomily was a child during World War II. Thus, his earliest life history overlaps with ours.

"'He knew music and composed some good songs of his own - rowdy but good. They're still being sung out on Mars.'" (The Psychotechnic League, p. 114)

This puts him in the same league as Heinlein's Rhysling and Anderson's Hugh Valland.

A few of his cells were used as a chromosome source for the Rostomily Brotherhood. I have been calling the Brotherhood "clones" although that word did not yet exist when this story was written. And cloning would not have given them all an interest in Shakespeare!

Rostomily was dead at the time of "Un-Man." However, he appears in "Marius," written later but set earlier. Several sf characters, including two others in this future history, have been presented in this way: either a dead character has later been shown while still alive or an older character has later been shown while still young.

"Un-Man," about the Brotherhood, and its sequel, "The Sensitive Man," are each what I call a "proto-series," i.e., two open-ended series could have been written, one about the Un-men, the other about the sensitive men. (Indeed, they would make excellent superheroes.) Instead, Anderson wrote a future history about different aspects of society over time. Within this more comprehensive series, the Un-men and one of the sensitive men get just one instalment each.

Bigger Than Heinlein...

In Robert Heinlein's Future History, the song "The Green Hills of Earth" expresses spacemen's nostalgia for their home planet as they travel further into the Solar System. The reference to terrestrial green is doubly poignant because the song is, fictitiously, written and sung by a man who was blinded by radiation in space: Jetman Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways, not exactly a new Homer or Milton but the herald of a new age nevertheless.

In a later future history, a different timeline and another planetary system, Dominic Flandry visits a planet where vegetation is mostly blue but where he nevertheless sees:

"...the unexpected and stingingly Homelike splashes of green." (1)

Rereading this passage reminded me sharply how far we have come from the single short story about Rhysling in the early period of the original Future History to the long series about Flandry in the later period of Poul Anderson's mature future history.

In the Future History, interplanetary economic oppression in "Logic of Empire" was followed by American religious dictatorship in "If This Goes On -." In Anderson's Technic History, interstellar economic oppression in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim was followed by social collapse in "The Star Plunderer," then by interstellar imperialism in several stories and novels. Thus, Anderson continued the Heinleinian tradition but in a longer series and on a vaster spatiotemporal scale.

In Heinlein's History, successful revolution against religious dictatorship was followed by resumption of interplanetary travel in a prosperous post-revolutionary society but the first mature culture did not emerge until after a further crisis involving an interstellar round trip and the prolongation of human life. In the Technic History, the Fall of the Empire was followed by chaos, then by restoration of civilization and, later, a new form of interstellar organization that might have transcended crises and wars.

Thereafter, Heinlein's lengthy novels, whether in or out of his Future History, degenerated into long, turgid conversational passages that are not to be recommended whereas Anderson blazed new trails in long speculative novels presenting new visions of possible futures. Thus, Anderson followed but surpassed Heinlein.

(1) Anderson, Poul, A Circus Of Hells, London, 1978, p. 85.