Thursday 27 March 2014

Escape The Morning

Here, I made three comparisons between Poul Anderson and Robert Heinlein. Here is a fourth. An entire section of Heinlein's Future History features near future Lunar colonization and some of these stories are narrated from juvenile points of view, including one about a Boy Scout en route to the colony on Venus but meanwhile lost on the Moon.

Juvenile novels were a major part of Heinlein's output. To some extent, his juvenile fiction and his Future History overlap. Not only are there a handful of juvenile stories in the Future History but, further, several of the Scribner Juvenile novels share a considerable amount of background material with the History despite not being fully consistent with that series.

Anderson did not write anything like the same amount of juvenile fiction but nevertheless incorporated four juvenile short stories into his major future history series, the History of Technic Civilization, and one longer juvenile work, originally published as a single volume, into his Time Patrol series. His non-series short story, "Escape The Morning," is Heinleinian in every respect:

published in Boy's Life and copyright Boy Scouts of America;
featuring a juvenile hero who is a Lunar colonist and is called on to rescue a stranded VIP.

Returning from Anderson's time travel collection, Past Times, to his space travel collection, Space Folk, I have just begun to reread "Escape The Morning" and find that I remember none of the details so that it is almost like reading a new story.

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