Life-Fiction Parallels

We find parallels between an author's (auto)biography and his fiction. Both CS Lewis and his character, Elwin Ransom, have the same experience of nearly drowning.

"...I held a primitive hand ax, a piece of flint chipped into shape in the Middle Acheulean period, perhaps a hundred thousand years ago, by a hunter - Homo erectus, not yet Neanderthal - and saw a tiny fossil embedded in it, left by a mollusc in a sea that drained and dried away perhaps a hundred million years ago."

-Poul Anderson, Going For Infinity (New York, 2002), I, p. 17.

 

"On a shelf in my home lies a relic of the Paleolithic, a so-called hand ax, a heavy piece of flint chipped into a sort of pear shape but once rimmed with sharp edges... It is Middle Acheulean, made perhaps a hundred thousand years ago by a hunter whose folk were not yet quite at the Neanderthal stage of evolution. Embbed in the flint is a fossil, a sea shell laid down perhaps a hundred million years ago...."

-Poul Anderson, "The Discovery of the Past" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 182-206 AT p. 184.

 

A hundred thousand years and a hundred million years. That hunter had no conception either of the fossil in his ax or of Poul Anderson later holding and possessing the ax. Is there a wider perspective of which we have no conception?

 

Sandra Tamarin:

 

"...found her eye falling on a battle-ax from Diomedes."

-Mirkheim, II, p. 56.

 

Sandra looking at the Diomedean ax reminded me of Anderson looking at the Acheulean ax although the difference is that Sandra had acquired her ax in a society where it was still in use.

 

Also on Poul Anderson's shelves was:

 

"...a fine statuette of a Diomedean, inhabitant of an imaginary planet of mine which was visited by human beings in the twenty-fifth century...."

-"The Discovery of the Past," pp. 185-186.