Wednesday 23 August 2017

Between Fictional Realms

This blog navigates between fictional universes and timelines. Such fictional realms are not equidistant but cluster together. Thus, characters cross over between SM Stirling's Nantucket and Emberverse timelines. The presence of Nicholas van Rijn in the inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix, establishes that Poul Anderson's Technic History timeline is, however tenuously or tangentially, connected to a multiverse that is featured in four other novels.

Fictional universes have stronger or weaker gravitational fields. For example, I dipped into Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows merely to confirm or disconfirm whether Dominic Flandry may accurately be described as a gourmet but wound up rereading and posting about the entire novel.

Having possbly escaped from the Flandry period of the Terran Empire, I have started to read SM Stirling's The Given Sacrifice and found reason to speculate about interaction between the Changed Earth and the text of Anderson's "Delenda Est." See here. I hope tomorrow to make further progress with this tenth (?) volume of the Emberverse series.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, seeing Nicholas van Rijn in the Old Phoenix story "House Rule," does at least tenuously connect the Technic History with A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST, THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS, OPERATION CHAOS, and OPERATION LUNA. But I'm glad PA did not try to "strongly" link up the Technic Civilization series with either the Old Phoenix "cluster" of stories or with the Time Patrol. It might too easily have been a failure and ruin the stories, which is what I think happened when Asimov linked up his Robot series with the FOUNDATION tales.

Sean