Friday 30 September 2016

An Alternative Reality In A Shop Window

We get used to thinking about alternative realities when reading the works of Poul Anderson and SM Stirling. (There are others but these are the two that I am focusing on.) However, we do not expect a total transposition of realities to hit us from a shop window:

an actor called George Lazenby played James Bond in the one Bond film that has an alpine setting;

the window of a second hand bookshop in Morecambe displays a juvenile adventure novel called Alpine Adventure by George Lazenby!

Everything has been inverted. Thus:

not a film but a book;
not an actor but an author called George Lazenby;
not only an alpine setting but even an "Alpine" title.

None of this affects the characters. They do not know whether they are in a film or book, they do not know the title and none of them is called George Lazenby! But they are different characters and he is the same George Lazenby! First he acted; then he authed. And another minor (very minor) coincidence is that a woman in the film says that she is from Morecambe Bay.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

The name "George Lazenbye" seemed familiar to me, reminding me of a Dom George Laysinbye, a monk of Jervaulx Abbey in Henry VIII's time. On July 11, 1535, agents of the king arrived to demand that the monks swear to the "Royal Supremacy," and agree that the King was Supreme Head of the Church of England (as decreed by the Act of Supremacy of 1534). One of the monks, Dom George laysinbye, objected to the sermon denying the authority of the Bishop of Rome, saying that the Pope "...had the most authority in all the above all other bishops." Needless to say, for this defiance, Dom George was arrested, and at his interrogation declared, "we must all be obedient unto the head of the militant church...the pope...and that he neither can nor will take the king's highness for to be the only and supreme head of the Church of England immediately on earth under God" (quotes from THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND, Vol. 1, by Philip Hughes, SJ, Macmillan, Fifth edition, 1963, page 290). Dom George was arrested and imprisoned for his defiance of the Supremacy, and probably executed, altho I've been unable to find further details about him.

Sean