Friday 30 September 2016

Poul Anderson, Neil Gaiman And Time Travel

I have mentioned many parallels between Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman but not that Gaiman also wrote about time travel.

See:

Time Travel In The Books Of Magic
Time Travel In The Books Of Magic II
Time Travel In The Books Of Magic III
A Little More On Time Travel 

There are more differences than similarities. Anderson's time travel fiction is prose hard sf. Gaiman's is graphic fantasy set in a shared universe that had already incorporated a future history and time travel. In a four volume story, Tim Hunter (a British schoolboy who is a powerful magician, wearing glasses and with a pet owl) is shown magic past, present, future and in the far realms. Thus, in the past, he meets Merlin; in the Land of Summer's Twilight, Titania. When he ventures into the sometimes Wellsian future, paradoxical questions arise which I have tried to address. See the above links.

I think that time travel came up because it fitted this story rather than because it was an issue that Gaiman wanted to address.

3 comments:

David Birr said...

Paul:
"...a British schoolboy who is a powerful magician, wearing glasses and with a pet owl..."

Wow. And people complain about Terry Pratchett's character Ponder Stibbons being too much like Harry Potter (those who make those complaints ignore the fact that Stibbons was created BEFORE any HP stories were written).

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, David!

And you beat me to mentioning how the description of Tim Hunter reminded me of Harry Potter! (Smiles)

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Warner owns Hunter and Potter.