The Past

Could I possibly have read Poul Anderson's "Son of the Sword" just once years ago and completely forgotten about it? On the one hand, the ending did seem vaguely familiar when I got to it. On the other hand, I think it is unlikely that I would have forgotten a story to that extent.

But, in any case, having now either reread or read it, I think it would fit perfectly at the midpoint of an Anderson "Many Times" collection where it could be preceded by two works of prehistorical fiction and followed by two stories set in the Roman and Viking periods, respectively. These are all periods about which Anderson wrote at greater length elsewhere.

The five stories represent Anderson's three main genres. "The Long Remembering" is science fiction about mental time travel to prehistory. "The Tale of Hauk" is a fantasy about the unrestful dead. "The Peat Bog" and "Son of the Sword" are historical fiction. "The Forest" is prehistorical but without any fantasy or sf - so maybe this is a fourth genre?

This would be a good companion volume to Past Times (revised edition), a collection of stories entirely about physical time travel to prehistory, the Viking period or the future. Also, two novels, The Corridors Of Time and The Boat of A Million Years, cover "many times" rather than a single period. In the former, characters travel to several periods of the past and future. In the latter, a small group of immortals survives through many historical periods through the "present," the time when the novel was written, and into a remote future. Yet again, it seems that Anderson imagines and addresses every possibility.

Finally, "Son of the Sword" includes the phrase, "'...mother of kings...,'" which became the title of a later Anderson novel. (Alight In The Void, New York, 1993, p. 151)