The Time Of Legends In Stirling, Niven, Lewis, Gaiman And Anderson

"...the Change did more than end the era of the machines. It reopened a doorway in the world. One that had slowly closed over many thousands of years, a passage to the time of legends, so that they walk among us once more."
-SM Stirling, The Desert And The Blade (New York, 2016), Chapter Two, p. 38.

A common fantasy premise is that legends were real but the world has changed:

Larry Niven has a series in which the magic was used up, the swordsmen started to defeat the sorcerers and a new way to control nature had to be found;

for a Neil Gaiman version, see Ramadan;

CS Lewis even had the time of legends ending in a fantasy realm but, when the Telmarine conquerors had banished even the memory of Talking Beasts and of mythological beings from Narnia, Prince Caspian, a Telmarine but also a true Narnian, wound Queen Susan's horn and called the ancient kings and queens down from the high past.

Although these are valid fantasy premises, it would be an unacceptable intrusion if the time of legends were to return in the middle of a contemporary novel or of a hard sf series like Poul Anderson's Technic History. Each work of fiction must retain its own integrity. But each kind of work can also acknowledge that its world is one of many. That is why it is appropriate when Nicholas van Rijn from the Technic History rubs shoulders with characters from other kinds of timelines in the Old Phoenix Inn.