Connections And Parallels

Because the Emberverse titles are listed in the wrong order in the back of my copy of The Sunrise Lands, I have got The Sword Of The Lady before The Scourge Of God but will acquire and read the latter before reading the former.

Of interest in the Acknowledgments of The Sword Of The Lady:

apparently, the opening paragraph of Poul Anderson's The Broken Sword is quoted as an ancestral epic in Chapter Seventeen;

Stirling refers to the song, "Fiddler's Green," which is yet another link to Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Gaiman's Fiddler's Green is a place in the Dreaming but escapes and wanders the waking world as a person called "Gilbert," modelled on GK Chesterton whose Fr Brown series we have just mentioned.

From (i) works of fiction by different authors and (ii) works of fiction about alternative histories, we can wind up with (iii) stories in which different authors' fictional narratives are set in alternative histories, as shown in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix stories. In Bill Willingham's Fables graphic novels, characters from fairy tales live in hiding in New York, having been driven out of their homelands on parallel Earths. Since the Trygve Yamamura novel that I am currently reading features Italian characters and concerns and since Pinnocchio has a big role in Fables, I find a powerful if obscure conceptual connection between this Yamamura novel and that graphic novel series. The connection is strengthened by the fact that we have just discussed parallel universes in relation to detective fiction.

As Anderson's Time Patrol finds chaos lurking behind time criminals, Stirling's Emberversers seem to find something else lurking behind their human enemies?

(Tomorrow looks like being even busier and less blog-friendly.)