By the end of this NOTE and therefore also of the novel, Holger Carlsen has ransacked bookshops for:
"'Grimoires. Treatises on magic.'" (p. 156)
- and has disappeared.
In A Midsummer Tempest, we learn that he has traveled between universes and is spending a night in the Old Phoenix.
Poul Anderson's short story, "Losers' Night," confirms that Holger Danske has been in the Old Phoenix and also mentions other guests of that inter-universal inn:
Theseus (Greek myth)
Scheherazade (Arabian nights)
Falstaff (Shakespeare)
Huck Finn (Mark Twain)
Irene Adler (Sherlock Holmes)
Red Hanrahan (Yeats)
blind Rhysling (Heinlein)
"...an Abelard who remained a whole man..." (Anderson's "House Rule")
"...a Rupert of the Rhine who outfought Cromwell..." (Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest)
"Losers' Night" also lists several outstanding women including:
Gunnhild (Anderson's Mother Of Kings; Wikipedia article mentions Anderson twice)
Valeria Matuchek (Anderson's Operation Otherworld and conversation with Holger in the inn)
Not a small world but a big multiverse.
Poul Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN Anderson, All One Universe (New York, May 1997), pp. 105-123 AT p. 111.
4 comments:
It's an ingenious way to get characters from different books to meet!
Kaor, Paul!
Besides what Stirling wrote above I want to stress another point. "Losers' Night" rightly focuses on Winston Churchill and Vincent Van Gogh, but we see another woman in that story most readers pay no attention to: Queen Mary I of England.
Ad astra! Sean
I was impressed by a snippet of overheard conversation between two unnamed characters in "Losers' Night". Enough information was given in the conversation for me to identify them as Brutus & Louis Riel. Few non-Canadians would have identified the latter.
Kaor, Jim!
At least I recognized Brutus the first time I read "Losers' Night."
Ad astra! Sean
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