21?

Why did I write in the previous post that Poul Anderson wrote twenty one novels set in the past? Partly to encourage any readers of that post to think about which twenty one I meant. I have been told that Poul and Karen Anderson regarded their The King Of Ys as one novel too long to be published in a single volume. In fact, it is published as a tetralogy of which each volume is quite thick.

There are two meanings of "trilogy": (i) one work in three parts and (ii) three related works. Thus, Tolkien's The Lord Of The Rings is a single narrative whereas James Blish's After Such Knowledge is three discrete novels. Ys, albeit a tetralogy, not a trilogy, is a work of type (i), not (ii).

By a novel, I mean a long prose fiction. How long? In practice, it is usually long enough to be published as a discrete volume, I would say 100+ pages minimum. A few novels can be collected in one omnibus volume although Ys would indeed be too long for that treatment. Because of their length and because of the need to publish them as separate volumes, I find it convenient to continue to think of Ys as four novels, not one.

My proposed twenty one follow classifications suggested in previous posts:

3 BC;
4 Ys;
8 Vikings;
3 14th century;
1 Time Patrol;
2 others - The Corridors Of Time and The Boat Of A Million Years.

There Will Be Time is a time travel novel whose action is equitably distributed through the past, present and future. Because of its passages set in Constantinople in particular, it could count as a twenty second novel of the past.