In Poul Anderson's The Corridors Of Time, Malcolm Lockridge refers to James Bond as a fictional character. An early indication that Storm Darroway is not native to the second half of the twentieth century is that she has to ask who Bond is.
In Anderson's "Time Patrol," Manse Everard meets a Victorian private investigator whom we recognize. This is one detail in which the Time Patrol universe differs overtly from ours.
In the timeline of Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest, Hamlet, Macbeth, Oberon, Titania, Romeo, Juliet, King Lear, Falstaff and Othello existed, there were cannon and a University of Wittenberg in Hamlet's time and clocks in Caesar's time, Richard III was a hunchbacked monster, Bohemia had a seacoast and witchcraft works.
In Anderson's There Will Be Time:
Jack Havig refers to Superman as a fictional character;
Anderson's Maurai stories and There Will Be Time are works of fiction;
a real time traveller gives the time travel idea to a nineteenth century English writer.
In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Wake, Clark Kent, disliking dreams in which he is an actor in a bad TV version of his life, asks his companions whether they get those. The Batman asks doesn't everyone and the Martian Manhunter replies that he doesn't.
Imaginative writers turn reality inside out. One character is referred to by different names in There Will Be Time and in The Sandman: The Wake.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
A timeline in which there was a real Sherlock Holmes would certainly be different!
A Bohemia which had a sea coast implies a much larger state than the land-locked kingdom of Bohemia of our real history. A realm which temporarily ruled Austria and Styria to its south.
Ad astra! Sean
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