Saturday 20 January 2018

Good Morning

Here, we are still sitting around in nightwear, recovering from bad colds. Last night, I had an idea for a post but was too tired to write it. Now, I cannot remember it. Let this post be its memorial.

Whenever I reread Poul Anderson's excellent time travel novel, There Will Be Time, I skip past Jack Havig's satirical political pamphlet which does not appeal to me - the one sour note in a brilliant sf novel. Whenever I reread Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, I skip past an illustrated fairy tale narrated by one of the characters, Gaiman's point being that the earliest versions of the fairy tales were indeed unpleasant.

The Sandman feels similar to Anderson's time travel fiction because it includes installments set in ancient Africa, Greece, Rome, Baghdad, China etc, through six centuries of English history and during the French Revolution and there is even limited time travel in the "soft places." A University course in Science Fiction might incorporate Anderson-Gaiman Studies.

1 comment:

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Kaor, Paul!

I remember that fictional (?) pamphlet "quoted" by Poul Anderson in THERE WILL BE TIME, and I thought it was tone and pitch PERFECT. Because there WERE (and still are) hard line left wing Americans who think and talk like the views expressed in that document. I think PA commented elsewhere on having personally known or seen such persons in San Francisco. So I somewhat grimly relished that pamphlet as an all too authentic bit of the 1960's seen in THERE WILL BE TIME.

Sean