Fashions

Carl Farness tells a fellow Time Patrol member from his future that he and his wife grew up during the sexual revolution of the 1960's. The colleague, unmoved and unimpressed by this reference to a particular decade in a past century, merely remarks that:

"'Fashions come and go.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Time Patrol (New York, 1991), p. 235.

This also happens in the Technic History:

van Rijn's generation seldom married;
but his children's generation did;
and his grandchildren's even revives patrilineal surnames.

Offered every alcoholic drink in creation, his granddaughter Coya accepts coffee. (Every drink includes "'...ansa...'" (David Falkayn: Star Trader, p. 647) so that planet has a drink named after it as well as an onion soup.) Van Rijn remarks that nakedness has become less acceptable and notices that Coya does not smoke. When he makes this a generational issue, she replies that:

"'A few of us try to exercise some forethought as well as our consciences...'" (p. 648)

"A few..." She does not go along with his categorization of every member of an entire generation. She does not entirely approve of the Polesotechnic League and, when van Rijn remarks that, as young people become more prudish, "'...companies and governments get more brutish.'" (p. 659), she replies that the latter causes the former.

Yet again, Anderson conveys a strong sense of social differences and complexities.