Tuesday 12 August 2014

The Hypothesis Realized

Some science fiction works by different authors are alternative answers to a common question. In Stephen Fry's Making History, because Hitler's father is made infertile, another previously unknown figure leads the Nazi Party and makes things in some ways worse by avoiding war so that there is still a powerful Nazi state decades later. Unfortunately, Fry's time travel logic is nonexistent. Among other problems, he describes cinema special effects when causality is violated. I wrote to him at the time but no correspondence ensued.

Poul Anderson is better than most at time travel. A few authors are as good as he is on some aspects but not across the board.

Is anyone out there wondering: How long can Shackley keep posting about the Time Patrol? I am convinced that this series is inexhaustible and that a word by word analysis would continue to reveal previously unsuspected nuances. However, there is going to be a limit to how much I can say about it without taking a break.

My current agenda is:

finish reading Stieg Larsson's third Millennium novel;
start reading Greg Bear's Eon, which I have just acquired;
post about Eon, possibly on the Science Fiction blog but more probably on Poul Anderson Appreciation because of Eon's Andersonian connections.

The only Anderson works that I have yet to track down are the NESFA collections Vol 2-up. This will be done, although individual short stories will feel like an anti-climax after the intricacies of the Technic History and the Time Patrol. 

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Ha, ha!!! I don't mind you talking FOREVER about Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories. I admire the zeal you have for commenting on those works and how much you have found in them.

I think you STILL have a few Anderson books you have not yet acquired. Such as at teast one of the Yamamura novels, the book astronomy he wrote for schoolchildren, and a collection of his poems called STAVES. And another children's book Anderson translated or adapted from Danish called THE FOX, THE DOG, AND THE GRIFFIN.

And, yes, any comments you care to make about Greg Bear's EON could just as logically be placed here as in the SF blog because of Bear's connections to PA.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
I have not got one Yamamura book because it seemed too expensive when I inquired.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Yes, you mean MURDER IN BLACK LETTER, I think. It seems to be the rarest and most expensive of the Yamamura books.

And I do recommend looking for a copy of STAVES.

Sean