Anderson, Three Hearts And Three Lions
Anderson, A Midsummer Tempest
Stirling, Conquistador
- three novels of cross-time travel.
However, the two Anderson titles are fantasies, involving supernatural beings and magic, whereas Conquistador by contrast is science fiction, assuming only:
an infinite series of parallel universes with identical physical laws;
a technological means of travel between them.
Adrienne Rolfe's experience differs from ours in just one respect: in the existence of the Gate and of what lies beyond it. However, what is beyond the Gate is an Earth where history went differently, not where myths are true. Thus, Three Hearts... and ...Tempest are as fantastic to Adrienne as they are to us.
Her literary predecessors also include the group of extra-temporal exiles in HG Wells' Men Like Gods but these characters are hardly major players in the history of sf. One major predecessor of many science fictional space and time explorers is the original Time Traveler, who could well have encountered a sabre-tooth as the New Virginians do at the end of Conquistador. In the Epilogue to The Time Machine, the outer narrator speculates that the Time Traveler has gone to:
the Stone Age;
the Cretaceous Sea;
the Jurassic Age;
the Triassic Age -
- so we can legitimately imagine him among prehistoric animals even though Wells never wrote a sequel.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I would include Stirling's four Draka books, esp. DRAKON, to the category where you placed OONQUISTADOR. DRAKON too is placed in "an infinite series of parallel universes with identical physical laws; [with] a technological means of travel between them."
I've been thinking of DRAKON and CONQUISTADOR because the New Virginians had darn well better NOT stumble across the Drakon alternate world! Because, unless they technologically advanced to the level reached by the Domination, they would be easy prey for conquest by the New Race Draka.
Sean
Sean,
And some of them would be only too willing to join the Draka if given the opportunity.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Hmmm, good point. The defeated Batyushkovs comes to mind! But it's pretty plain Salvatore Colletta II would not be among them. Because he lacks his father and grandfather's ambitions.
Sean
Sean,
Also the young Boers' attitude at the prospect of acquiring "kaffir" women.
Paul.
Kaor ,Paul!
True, but most of the transplanted Boers seem to have been like Piet Botha: it was better to forget about their old home in First Side South Africa and make new lives in the Commonwealth. My point being that the Boers would, in time, be ASSIMILATED by a New Virginian majority who did not share the nastier views of those Boers who still hankered for South Africa.
Sean
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