Change And Time

 

Genesis, PART ONE, V.

Laurinda Ashcroft quotes Shakespeare:

"'"A sea change,"' she murmured, '"into something rich and strange."'" (p. 38)

This is from The Tempest (see here) to which Poul Anderson wrote a sequel, A Midsummer Tempest.

Laurinda also echoes Shakespeare:

"And the years will not return." (p. 44)

O, call back yesterday, bid time return,

- copied from here.

What better way to convey a sense of the passage of time than to have Laurinda visited by a former lover whom she has not seem for a very long time. They discuss their shared past and the future of Earth and she knows that this will be their last meeting. As the narrator stated in the opening paragraph of this novel, time moves through the story, more mysterious than ghosts or gods.