Time In Fiction II

Mirkheim, IV.

"'Oh, no!' Falkayn groaned. 'What's happened to you two in the past three years?'" (p. 76)

We notice that it has been auctorially decided and decreed that the three members of Nicholas van Rijn's first trade pioneer crew have been apart for, specifically, three years. Of course, an author has complete control over the length of time that he says has elapsed between the episodes of a series. A sequel written twenty years after the original work can, if the author wants it to, open five minutes after the close of that work or, alternatively, a sequel begun five minutes after completing that original work can be set twenty years later. And so on.

I have not seen any Ghostbusters films but I did see the trailer to Ghostbusters II in which a character was checking his equipment after a lapse of time. This is metafiction. The time that has passed for the characters is probably meant to corresponds to the time that has elapsed for cinema audiences although this need not have been the case. II could have commenced immediately after the close of I. Instead, the script acknowledges the time that has elapsed outside the script.

In Mirkheim, Poul Anderson does something more complicated with time in order to wind up the Polesotechnic League sub-series of his Technic History. "Lodestar," published in 1973, is set ten years before Mirkheim, published in 1977. However, the Prologue of Mirkheim includes a section headed Y minus 9. This section is set nine years before Falkayn's reference to "'...the past three years.'" During those nine years, Coya Conyon/Falkayn has joined the crew for five years, then the crew has been disbanded for three years. That totals eight but I suppose that an extra year can be fitted in there somewhere.