Adapted Men II

Copied from Poul Anderson Appreciation:

In "Starfog," the last story of Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, descendants of the Aenean rebels who fled from known space at the end of The Rebel Worlds, have spent so many generations ingesting, and becoming dependent on, heavy metals and becoming tolerant of ionizing radiation that they can no longer interbreed with standard humanity; they are no longer human.

In "Watershed," the last story of James Blish's pantropy series, Earth has changed so much that it will now be colonized by Adapted Men while standard humanity must adapt to the new social role of a racial minority - a historical watershed for the sometimes despised Adapted Men.

These different scenarios have in common the understanding that, over long periods of time, everything changes, from planetary environments to DNA. And there is no unchanging human nature.

Fifteen Volumes

Before Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization was gathered into seven omnibus volumes, it had been spread across perhaps eighteen regular-sized volumes, whether novels or collections. Other authors, of course, have written linear series of comparable or even greater length. The central part of James Blish's more compact body of work comprises fifteen volumes including prequels, sequels and cross-references although without in this case combining into any single linear sequence:

The Star Dwellers and Mission To The Heart Stars are companion volumes;
The Quincunx Of Time and Midsummer Century are, very slim, companion volumes;
each of these diptychs is loosely linked to one other, shorter, work;
the two shorter works, "A Dusk Of Idols" and "A Style In Treason," were collected in Anywhen;
each of the diptychs also refers back to an earlier work featuring Adolph Haertel;
Mission To The Heart Stars summarizes the plot of "Common Time," collected in Galactic Cluster where it does form a linear sequence with two other stories;
The Quincunx Of Time refers, less directly, to Welcome To Mars;
one other novel, A Case Of Conscience, refers to Haertel and is Volume III of the After Such Knowledge Trilogy;
two parallel linear "tetralogies" are the pantropy series, collected in one volume, and the Okies series, collected in four regular volumes or one omnibus volume.

These fifteen regular-sized volumes contain six series with mutual cross-references and sometimes even overlapping contents. Since Volumes I and II of After Such Knowledge are, respectively, a historical novel and a contemporary fantasy, they seem to be far removed from the remaining thirteen volumes. However, the central character of Volume I is Roger Bacon, the founder of scientific method, thus an early predecessor of Blish's fictional scientists, including Haertel.

Parallel Blogs

I am trying to run two blogs in tandem at present. I think it is appropriate to read and study the works of James Blish and Poul Anderson in conjunction with each other but there are consistently more page views on the Poul Anderson Appreciation blog than there are here.

The most recent addition to the Poul Anderson blog, "Cadet Loftus And Ensign Flandry," (see here) summarizes a passage in Blish's The Star Dwellers (London, 1979) where that novel's central character, Jack Loftus, is said to have read a kind of fiction that sounds as if it could well include the Flandry series. I could just copy that post here, as with some others in the past, but I am now trying to refer readers of each blog to the other.

The Flandry series is more or less implausible space opera of a kind that is well critiqued in the relevant passage of The Star Dwellers but what is important about it is that it is very good space opera and hard sf and social commentary, thus not a body of work to be summarily dismissed as "'...nonsense...' " (p. 49).

Since The Star Dwellers was written as a reply to Robert Heinlein's Starship Troopers, anyone interested in serious science fiction would do well to read in succession:

Heinlein's five volume Future History;
Heinlein's fourteen juvenile novels, including Starship Troopers;
Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, including the Flandry series, now republished in seven omnibus volumes;
Blish's four volume future history;
Blish's two Jack Loftus novels.

There is more, of course, but I have just referred to thirty two volumes as a starter.