Wednesday 1 May 2013

Twilight World, Heroes And X-Men


Poul Anderson's Twilight World (London, 1984) is a bit like Marvel Comics X-Men and the Heroes TV series: favourable mutations are gathered together.

Jim Collingwood: running faster, jumping higher and holding breath longer;
Joe Gammony: perfect sense of balance and direction;
an unnamed girl: same powers as Joe;
Abe Feinberg: highly developed tactile sense and micrometric work;
Misha Ivanovitch: strong as a horse;
Lois Grenfell: sub- and supersonic hearing with superior tone discrimination;
Tom O'Neill: telescopic vision;
Alexander Arkelian: superfast perception and reaction (although nearly punched by Collingwood);
unnamed: a lightning calculator;
Alaric Wayne: holistic thinking;
others.

The third story, "The Children of Fortune," begins only twenty nine years, thus one generation, after the Final War.

Hugh Drummond, viewpoint character of "Prologue," is mentioned as the first post-War President in "Chain of Logic," the story that introduces Alaric Wayne, whose mutant brain is referred to in section 4 of "The Children of Fortune," although the viewpoint character of this third story is Collingwood. Thus, the series, if continued in this vein, would have become a future history and, in fact, the four page "Epilogue" is set thousands of years later when archaeologists visiting Earth have found a tin box containing a post card sent to Drummond.

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