In Lewis' The Great Divorce, the author is guided through the foothills of Heaven by George MacDonald.
In Lewis' The Hideous Strength, Horace Jules, novelist and Director of the National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments, is an uncharitable parody of HG Wells.
In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, a mutant time traveller gives the time travel idea to an English writer - HG Wells.
Also in There Will Be Time, another mutant time traveller gives the ideas of the Maurai Federation and of mutant time travelling to one Robert Anderson who passes them on to - Poul Anderson.
A neat relay race through four works of imaginative fiction.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And it is possibly relevant that in Chapter 15 of ENSIGN FLANDRY a bored Persis d'Io complained to Flandry that their boat contained only two novels, OUTLAW BLASTMAN and PLANET OF SIN, obviously popular pulp novels of that time. True, the names of their authors were not given.
Sean
Paul:
Though far from relevant to Anderson or Blish, I find THIS humorously relevant to the topic of giving authors ideas:
There's a Japanese TV cartoon, *Haiyore! Nyaruko-san*, based on the notion that horror writer H.P. Lovecraft got the concept for several of his sinister "Great Old Ones" in the *Cthulhu Mythos* from anecdotes told to him by visiting extraterrestrials. The actual aliens are shown to be not nearly as horrific as Lovecraft portrayed them. As an example, the Cthulhu Corporation, rather than being a monster with godlike powers, is an extraterrestrial company that produces video games and other entertainments.
Title character Nyaruko is a pretty, somewhat silly girl from the planet Nyarlathotep. Lovecraft described Nyarlathotep as an evil "god" with a thousand forms, nicknamed "the Crawling Chaos"; Nyaruko introduces herself as "the Chaos that always crawls up to you with a smile — Nyarlathotep!"
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