Not Read Yet

Regarding Poul Anderson titles not yet read by me, Murder In Black Letter remains available but too expensive for my budget.

Since the SM Stirling novel to which I referred here was In The Courts Of The Crimson Kings, I searched the blog to see what, if anything, I had already posted about this novel. See here. There is an explicit reference to Poul Anderson but the viewpoint character of this passage is Frederik Pohl.

The fictional Pohl reflects that sf settings will have to go extrasolar as meanwhile Louis L'Amour and James Michener will fictionalize the exploits of planetary explorers, just as Kit Carson was fictionalized in his own lifetime. Carson even read dime novels about himself while he still really was fighting Indians in the Rockies. That is an interesting relationship when it occurs - between the real man and his fictional counterpart. If someone writes a novel in which Kit Carson reads a "Kit Carson" dime novel, then a fictional Carson reads about a fictional Carson or, to be more precise, a realistically fictional Carson reads about a fancifully fictional Carson.

Somewhere in Stirling's first "Lords of Creation" novel, The Sky People, an explorer on Venus reflects that people on Earth enjoy fictional accounts of the exploits of named planetary explorers. (Correction, 4 June 2015: not named. See here.) And this happens in a work of fiction that is written to celebrate earlier works of fiction written at a time when Mars and Venus really might have turned out to be inhabitable. Pretty smart stuff.