Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Anderson's Genesis ask: if it were possible, would it be right to create human life? Asimov's robots are not human but are self-aware rational beings with artificial brains so the same moral question arises and Asimov uses the phrase, "the Frankenstein Complex." Asimov's I, Robot focuses on the psychology of robots whereas his Foundation series focuses on a science of humanity.
Verne's characters circumnavigate the Moon. Wells' characters land there. Characters created by Heinlein and his successors live there. So far, astronauts have followed Verne and Wells but not Heinlein.
Man remakes himself with science in Wells' and Stapledon's future histories whereas any such attempt would be demonically controlled according to CS Lewis' That Hideous Strength.
In Heinlein's Future History, technology advances while society changes whereas, in Stirling's Emberverse, society copes when technology regresses.
Wells' The Time Machine addresses the future of life on Earth but not the mutability of the timeline whereas Anderson exhaustively explores the latter question.
Andersonian futures feature post-nuclear reconstruction, relativistic interstellar travel, human immortality and human-AI interaction. Messages arrive from the future in Stapledon's Last And First Men, Blish's The Quincunx Of Time and Anderson's Starfarers. Gravity control means asteroid colonization in an Anderson future history and flying cities in a Blish future history.
Adapted human beings colonize Venus, then Neptune, in Stapledon's future history and Ganymede, then extrasolar planets, in Blish's The Seedling Stars whereas unadapted human beings colonize Mars in Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and extrasolar planets in Anderson's Rustum History - and in a lot of other sf.
Anderson's Psychotechnic History addresses Heinleinian and Asimovian themes whereas his Technic History addresses historical cycles.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I may come back to this blog piece more than once, so I'll focus on just one or two points. Anderson's GENESIS shows us a far more plausible means of creating human life what we see in Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN. Gaia, the AI controlling Earth in the far, far future, "resurrected" mankind by using stored human genetic material. With the resulting infants being raised by robots till old enough to take care of themselves.
But I still remain skeptical it will even be possible to create artificial, self aware rational beings of the kind seen in Asimov's Robot stories or the sophotects Anderson's HARVEST OF STARS books. And I think Anderson himself was inclined to share this skepticism, despite being willing to use the idea in his own works.
Sean
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