The Universal Soldier

An idea for an sf novel:

a very long novel with many short chapters (could be endlessly serialized in magazines before eventual book publication);

each chapter shows the protagonist in combat in a major war, starting in prehistory, passing through many historical periods and the present and into the future which also has many dissimilar periods, e.g., war on Earth in the twenty-fourth century is very different from war on Mars in the twenty-sixth century;

no up-front explanation of why this guy is alive in all these periods (think of John Carter, always a soldier, remembering no childhood);

his name changes appropriately, i.e., Joannes becomes Johan, Jan, Jean, John, Sean etc;

some ambiguity as to whether he is killed at the end of some of the chapters, e.g., is he killed in an explosion or just concealed by smoke?;

maybe a future period of global peace when our protagonist does not seem to exist?;

a further future in which a Time Travel Institute plans to send a man to experience combat in many past periods;

if killed, he can be retrieved, resurrected and sent back.

Heinlein And Anderson: A Brief Comparison

Heinlein's Future History and the first of Anderson's several future histories could each be collected in two omnibus volumes. See here.

Each wrote three circular causality narratives. However, Anderson also wrote a time travel series that is complete in two long volumes and enough time travel short stories for a further collection.

Heinlein wrote more juvenile sf but Anderson wrote in several genres.

Heinlein's writing deteriorated badly whereas Anderson's remained creative and innovative into the twenty first century.

Lignin Degrader

Julian May, Intervention, 12.

Sf covers every kind of scientific advance, not just spaceships, aircars or superior weapons. James Blish's They Shall Have Stars goes into technical details about the discovery of anti-gravity and of antiagathic drugs. In Intervention:

"One of my nephew's underhanded acquisitions was a small genetic-engineering firm in Burlington, Vermont. This outfit had perfected and patented a bacterial organism called a lignin degrader, that broke down (i.e., 'ate') a common waste product of the pulpwood industry, converting it into a host of valuable chemicals that had heretofore been obtained from increasingly scarce petroleum." (p. 507)

Technology involves economics which involves business (and other) arrangements between human beings. Thus, the narrator's nephew, needing additional capitalization, approaches an even bigger crook to proposed a merger sealed by two Mafia-style arranged marriages.

An sf novelist combines scientific speculations with character interactions. 

The Disintegartion Of The Soviet Union

"In those dark days, when even persons of goodwill were soul-burdened with the malign aetheric resonances of hatred, fear and suffering, there were many people in the United States who watched the disintegration of the Soviet Union with righteous triumphalism: the godless Commies had finally got what was coming to them."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 17, p. 549.

Intervention is copyright Julian May 1987. Chapter 17 is set in 2007.

Robert Heinlein had the first rocket to the Moon in 1978 as far as I can remember without going upstairs to check. Fortunately, World War III did not happen in the twentieth century but all those weapons still exist. Current affairs and future histories interpenetrate.

Catholicisms

Contrast the medieval Catholicism of Poul Anderson's The High Crusade (see here) with the modern and future Catholicism of Julian May's Pliocene/Intervention/Galactic series.

Denis Remillard, while confessing to a Jesuit priest in 1995, mentions that he values highly the opinions of two colleagues, a Neo-Marxist and a Tibetan lama turned idealistic humanist. The priest comments that, in both of those faiths, the good of society is paramount over that of the individual whereas Christianity and Western civilization give the individual sovereignty in reproductive matters, which is the issue that they are discussing. Thus, a reasoned exchange between alternative world views is possible.

Later in May's series, a woman Jesuit priest officiates at a same sex marriage. That will not happen in our timeline.

The St. Francis Hotel In Two Timelines

"The speech ended to applause and the split screen showed pan shots as the network cameras swept over Baumgartner's campaign workers, who packed the ballroom of the famous old St Francis Hotel."
-Julian May, Intervention (London, 1988), 9, p. 474.

"They met downtown next morning, in the anachronistic opulence of the St. Francis Hotel lobby."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART SIX, 1990 A.D., p. 430.

Baumgartner's campaign is in 1996 but these are different timelines.

For earlier blog references to the St. Francis Hotel, see here.

Four More Future Histories

Back To Methuselah by George Bernard Shaw.
The Galactic Center Saga by Gregory Benford.
A Short History of the Future by W. Warren Wagar.
The Third Millennium: A History Of The World: AD 2000-3000 by Brian Stableford and David Langford.

OK. I read Back To Methuselah once decades ago, have read perhaps two Galactic Center volumes and had not heard of the other two works until they appeared on recent Internet searches.

Blog readers will see that I have not kept up with contemporary sf and are invited to comment to that effect.