Wellsian And Stapledonian Anderson

In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, an expedition from the far future travels to the Egyptian Eighteenth Dynasty in search of cultural inspiration. Similarly, I find inspiration among the blog posts of 2012 and 2013, which I currently revisit for "blog maintenance," a worthwhile and enjoyable but also time-consuming behind-the-scenes activity.

I find that I have referred to, but still have never read, The Infinite Voyage by Poul Anderson. See here. That volume has now been ordered. I have read slightly different accounts of its theme but will soon know.

An early work by Anderson that combines pulp absurdities with cosmic grandeur is "Flight to Forever," which is both Wellsian and Stapledonian, a claim often made on this blog. HG Wells introduced the idea of a scientist who invents a temporal vehicle, then sets off into the complete unknown of the future - tomorrow, the day after that and everything beyond them. The author is limited only by his imagination and by what he might extrapolate from history and from his contemporary period. After the introductory passages, the story could move in any direction. Different authors asked to extrapolate from the same opening section of a time travel story would create entirely dissimilar and unrelated narratives.

In "Flight to Forever," Martin Saunders and Sam Hull follow in the Time Traveler's footsteps, starting not from the author's "present" in 1950 but from his near future in 1973. Like the Time Traveler, Saunders returns at the end of the story to the day of his departure. However, like the narrator of Stapledon's Star Maker, Saunders has seen more than the future and end of life on Earth. He also been on a cosmic journey through time and space to the end of the universe. And, unlike Stapledon's narrator, he brings back the memory of a woman, Taury the Red. "Flight to Forever" ends with a sense of cosmic and personal completion.

"Another Stapledon"

"As for visions, we writers have never matched the transcendence of what some scientists have beheld. Nor do I expect we ever shall. We can only hope for another Stapledon to put it into fictional terms, as he did the cosmology of his period. That will be no minor success."
-Poul Anderson, "Wellsprings of Dream" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, 1997), pp. 235-247, AT p. 238.

I have read this article before but had not remembered this passage. Much earlier on this blog (here), I described Anderson as the modern Stapledon.

In Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker, telepathically linked organic intelligences originating throughout the universe form a Cosmic Mind. In Anderson's Genesis, electromagnetically linked post-organic intelligences emanating from Earth evolve towards a Cosmic Mind. Thus, Anderson effectively updates Stapledon but, of course, he does so by writing with creativity and originality, as both Wells and Stapledon had done, not by merely imitating his predecessors. (Also compare Wells' The Time Machine with Anderson's time travel series, novels and short stories.)

I know that several sf writers since Anderson have addressed cosmological themes and that I have not kept abreast of this more recent sf but my question is whether any more recent writer has yet addressed such themes with the level of literary skill, historical knowledge and sociological understanding displayed by Anderson.

Cosmic Histories

Olaf Stapledon wrote:

a future history, Last And First Men;

a futuristic perspective on past history, Last Men In London;

an unfinished cosmic history, Nebula Maker;

a completed cosmic history, Star Maker;

a contemporary science fiction (sf) novel linked to Last Men and Star Maker, Odd John;

a short story set in one of the sonic universes created by the experimenting Star Maker, "A World of Sound."

Martians invade Earth. Terrestrials invade Venus and Neptune where they become Venerians and Neptunians, respectively. Neptunians mentally time travel. The Solar System is a different place after the catastrophe that led to the colonization of Neptune. The galactic mind briefly reviews Solar history, then merges into the cosmic mind which glimpses the Star Maker and his ultimate cosmos to which ours is related as a single particle.

Stapledon presents four Wellsian themes, time travel, space travel, Martian invasion and future history, in the first Last Men volume. Further, his fictitious history summarizes the entire human future whereas his predecessor, Wells, had initiated future histories by recounting two centuries including a major turning point. Stapledon, the ultimate sf writer according to Brian Aldiss, and also in my opinion, was at home in places that most people do not know about.

In my experience of reading sf, Stapledon's main successor is Poul Anderson. Readers of more recent cosmic-scale authors will have to tell me whether they think that those authors write as well as Wells, Stapledon or Anderson.

Anderson's much greater body of work includes several future histories. An outline of a cosmic history emerges from his Tau Zero, with significant input from "Pride" (IN Anderson, Space Folk, New York, 1989):

Sol's brown dwarf ("half-star" (p. 1); "sub-sun" (p. 20)) companion, Nemesis, has several large planets, one bearing life;

Nemesis' orbit intersects the Oort cloud, disrupting cometary orbits, thus causing some comets to fall towards the Sun;

cometary impacts kill many Terrestrial species, including dinosaurs, ammonites and Miocene mammals;

homo sapiens becomes dominant on Earth;

there are nuclear wars in the late twentieth century;

entrusted with maintaining world peace, Sweden becomes the single super power for at least two centuries;

Antarctica, the Moon and Mars are colonized;

a Bussard spaceship, Anna Lovinda, makes the four light year round trip to Nemesis, thus establishing that the four light year one way trip to Alpha Centauri is feasible;

Bussard spaceship crews explore and colonize several extrasolar planets;

one spaceship, Leonora Christine, accelerates uncontrollably until the universe contracts and re-expands;

the Leonora Christine crew colonizes a terrestroid planet in the new universe;

their descendants might become the Elder Race of that universe.

Anderson has no Stapledonian observer overseeing cosmic history but does present a continuous narrative from Nemesis in the far past to a human universe in an immeasurable future.

Despite the conceptual link between them, Anderson's Tau Zero and World Without Stars cannot occupy the same timeline because, in the latter novel, the early twenty first century is dominated not by Sweden in the aftermath of nuclear warfare but by the imminent production of the antithanatic. In any case, Tau Zero presents a relativistic universe where one character dismisses the notion of faster than light travel as a fantasy whereas a premise of World Without Stars is the possibility of instantaneous intergalactic jumps. These are two different and independent cosmic novels.