In The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part Five, pp. 259-265, Poul Anderson links "'...anomalous variations in reality...'" (p. 261) to a thunder storm through the pathetic fallacy. The storm approaches while a colleague warns Manse Everard about "'...instability in [certain] sections of history.'" (p. 262)
"Lightning flickered in darkness, bright enough to pierce through the lamps of New York. Thunder was still too distant to overcome traffic rush; wind and rain would follow." (p. 259)
The storm arrives just as Everard wonders whether Time Patrol agents in the far future might:
"...be afraid of what he barely hinted at, a chaos they cannot chart and therefore cannot turn aside? Are they making what desperate provision they can?
"Lightning flared like a banner suddenly flown above the enclosing towers." (p. 265)
In The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), Neil Gaiman goes further by identifying variations in reality with a storm. If, when I asked, "What is a reality storm?" here, you thought that that sounded like something out of Star Trek, then you agreed with one of Gaiman's characters. Our reality, in which people sometimes think, "That sounds like something out of Star Trek," is one of the many realities that interact at the Worlds' End as my friend Kevin (mentioned before) found when I told him about the reality storm and he responded, "That sounds like something out of..."
GK Chesterton knew of the Inn at the Worlds' End:
"For you and me and all brave men, my brother,' said Wayne, in his strange chant, 'there is good wine poured in the inn at the end of the world.'"
-GK Chesterton, The Napoleon Of Notting Hill (1904), quoted in Gaiman, op. cit., p.1.
Douglas Adams wrote not only The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy but also The Restaurant At The End Of The Universe.
OK but what is a reality storm?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I've also wondered if Rivendell, the house of Elrond Halfelven in Tolkien's Middle Earth Mythos, might also be compared with the Old Phoenix amd the Inn At The Worlds End. More than one character has commented on how the Last Homely House East of the Sea is far more than what it appears to be.
Sean
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