Thursday 23 March 2017

Boring!

SM Stirling, A Meeting At Corvallis (New York, 2007), Chapter One, p. 12.

After the Change, these school subjects are boring:

Presidents;
rockets;
atoms;
"'...all that hooey.'"

These subjects are more like real life:

King Arthur;
Robin Hood;
Niall of the Nine Hostages;
Thor's trip to Jotunheim;
A Midsummer Night's Dream.

Connections with Poul Anderson's works:

Niall of the Nine Hostages destroyed Ys;
the former King of Ys formed a defensive alliance with British leaders of the generation before Arthur;
an immortal met the original of Arthur;
Anderson's fantasies feature Thor and a trip to Jotunheim although not Thor's trip to Jotunheim;
A Midsummer Tempest is a sequel to A Midsummer Night's Dream and The Tempest.

And why did Shakespeare not write a Robin Hood play, having mentioned Robin in As You like It?

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I can see why things like rockets would bore school children in post-Change societies. The very first rockets were made using gunpowder and now you can't make even fire crackers with gunpowder!

I would regret if things like a knowledge of atoms were forgotten. Even if it was now much harder to make use of such information.

Sean