Christopher Tolkien published his father's unfinished poem, The Fall Of Arthur, with a commentary. The Arthurian legend is set in post-Roman Britain. Poul and Karen Anderson's The King Of Ys Tetralogy is a parallel narrative set in Roman and post-Roman Brittany.
An immortal in Poul Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years tells Cardinal Richelieu that, in post-Roman Britain, he visited the court of a warlord, Artorius, who resisted English invaders. Anderson could, of course, have written an Arthurian historical fantasy novel but instead wrote many other imaginative works. Richelieu asks the immortal whether he is the Wandering Jew as, in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, an immortal Englishman is mistaken for - the Wandering Jew.
The Particle At The End Of The Universe by Sean Carroll, who sounds as though he should be related to Lewis Carroll, describes in accessible language the discovery of the Higgs boson. How can data recorded on macroscopic instruments disclose the nature of subatomic particles, especially one that travels less than a billionth of an inch in the less than 1000,000,000,000,000,000,000th of a second between its creation and its decay? I now have a very slight and partial layman's knowledge as opposed to none before.
In Anderson's sf novels, like Mirkheim, human stories are generated from scientific premises for example about what happens to particles in extreme conditions like the surface of a super-Jovian planet when its primary goes supernova. The Higgs boson is the sort of cosmological discovery that could have been incorporated into such Andersonian hard sf.
5 comments:
Hi, Paul!
Ah, THE FALL OF ARTHUR! I too have a copy of that book edited by Christopher Tolkien. And I greatly enjoyed the poem left lamentably unfinished by J.R.R. Tolkien. Full disclosure, I got bogged down on Christopher's commentary. Tolkien was a great writer in many ways, but alas, as both he and C.S. Lewis said, he had an unfortunate tendency to not FINISH works he had started. Which means we are darn lucky to have THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
Perhaps I should add that Tolkien did manage to finish what became THE CHILDREN OF HURIN, if only in a rather "scattered" way. Christopher Tolkien was able to pull the various parts of the tragic story of Turin and his sister into a "complete" work with only minimal editing.
I know of fans who dislike THE CHILDREN OF HURIN because they find it too fierce, dark, grim, and tragic a book. But I appreciated it in part precisely because of those things. It shows how Tolkien was able to write a "dark" story. CHILDREN also reminded me in some ways of Poul Anderson's THE BROKEN SWORD, which was also a grim and dark tale.
Sean
Sean,
Thank you for comments. As you can see, I have other things to read than Anderson! - but can often see some connection. And Anderson's range is shown by the fact that there is some relevance both in a book on Arthur and in another on the Higgs.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
I certainly DON'T mind in the least that you read other works than the books of Poul Anderson! (Smiles) Altho, even more than you, I'm totally unable to comment on the Higgs particle. But I can indeed see Poul Anderson incorporating the Higgs particle in a story or novel had he lived long enough to do so.
And getting back to Tolkien, I'll complete a thought I left implicit in my previous comment. I think one reason some fans don't like THE CHILDREN OF HURIN is because the book ends with the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, apparently triumphant over his foes. This clashes with how THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS has the better side winning. And that apparently was a "turn off" for many readers.
Sean
A history has to show some bad endings.
Hi, Paul!
True! And we see that idea in the works of Poul Anderson as well. For example, the Terran Empire was better than either the tyranny of Merseia or the chaos and anarchy of a "Long Night" that Dominic Flandry considered the only other alternatives. Nonetheless, all he dared to hope for was to help prolong the lifespan of the Empire, not for its eternal existence.
Hmmmm, wee THAT idea in THE LORD OF THE RINGS too. There are no permanenty victories for the good because new perils and dangers will always arise.
Sean
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