Characters from different genres meet in the Old Phoenix. Analogously, real and fictional characters can meet in fiction although not in reality:
fictional characters, including time travelers, meet historical characters (see Anderson's Time Patrol);
Jack Havig knows Robert Anderson who knows Poul Anderson;
Ian Fleming's G. is fictional but his superior, Serov, who phones for an update, is real;
CS Lewis meets Elwin Ransom;
Mikael Blomkvist meets Paolo Roberto.
I am rereading Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy for a rest from late night blogging but reading about Blomkvist phoning Roberto prompts reflections on kinds of character interactions.
Addendum: Alan Moore claims to have seen his fictional character, John Constantine, in reality, as, I believe, have one or two other writers of the character.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
If I had to guess, I would say that foreign language translation of A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST is Italian.
Some scientists have seriously speculated about the possibility of alternate universes being REAL. And, if a means of passing over from one to another is ever found, then it might be possible for historical characters from one universe meeting "themselves" in another!
Sean
Paul and Sean:
In one of H. Beam Piper's books, a policeman is accidentally pulled out of his own universe and into another. The Paratime Police, not yet certain just how far from his home world the man has been flung, worry about the possibility that he wound up right "next door" and will, when he reports to his headquarters, find his identical alternate self there on duty ... which would blow the Paratime Secret sky-high.
Kaor, DAVID!
That sounds like a very cool story to have read. I can see why you are such a fan of H. Beam Piper. I did wonder if this policeman would not have soon seen that something was wrong, that he was seeing things and people not seen in his home universe. That was what Poul Anderson had Holger Carlsen soon noticing after HE was flung from our universe to the Carolingian world of THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS (WITH the additional twist that Carolingian timeline was his home universe!). But I like Piper's idea of the policeman meeting his own alternate self.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Commenting on your Addendum: there's also JRR Tolkien, who seems to have been at least half convinced his Middle Earth mythos was real! Which means he may have thought at least some of the characters he "created" were real too.
Sean
Sean:
The idea of him meeting his alternate self was only "worst-case" speculation on the part of the Paracops. In fact, he was tossed into a universe as vastly different from our own as Holger was, although NOT one where magic was real. The divergence point was so far back in time that what we call Indo-Europeans came to the Americas not from Europe but across the Pacific from Asia.
Kaor, DAVID!
Interesting twist on history, that the proto-Indo/Europeans moved EAST instead of westwards, and ended up in the Americas. That would indeed make for a vastly different history! Esp. if, unlike the Archaic Caucasians of Anderson's "Beringia" section in THE SHEILD OF TIME, these Indo/Europeans were not technologically backwards.
Sean
In our history the Proto-Indo-Europeans spread both west and east. Some of them ended up in what is now western China and contributed to the ancestry of the Uighurs.
Kaor, Jim!
And these unlucky Uighurs are currently being mercilessly ground into extinction by the Maoists!
Ad astra! Sean
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