Monday 20 April 2015

History In Parallel Works

"The marriage brought [Lugo] certain useful connections, her father being a curial, though no dowry worth mentioning, the curial class being crushed between taxes and civic duties."
-Poul Anderson, The Boat Of A Million Years (London, 1991), p. 5.

I thought that Anderson had described the plight of the curials before, or indeed that both of the Andersons had alluded to this issue in their King of Ys tetralogy, so I googled "Poul Anderson curials" and was referred to this blog. See here. Thus, both Gratillonius' father and Lugo's grandfather were impoverished curials. Lugo/Hanno was born in Tyre when Hiram was king there. Manson Everard of the Time Patrol visited Tyre in that period and even met Hiram.

These are three works of two kinds:

Ys is historical fiction with the fantasy elements of gods and magic;
Boat... is historical science fiction with the sf elements of immortality and a high tech future;
the Time Patrol is historical science fiction with the sf element of time travel from the future.

Ys, published as a tetralogy of novels, is a single long narrative;
Boat..., published as a single long novel, could have been serialized or its concluding futuristic section (145 pages) published as a sequel to the historical and contemporary sections;
the Time Patrol is a series. 

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