-Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Moon Maid (Ace Books, New York, undated), PROLOGUE, p. 8.
"'Oh, God, the young, the poor young!'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), Foreword, p. 6.
I thought that these passages were similar. ERB's character, Julian, pre-remembers future incarnations whereas Anderson's character, Robert Anderson, has spoken to a time traveler.
I also thought that there was some similarity between a passage in Anderson's "House Rule" and the opening chapter of ERB's The Moon Men (see here) but that connection is more diffuse.
7 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
How in tarnation can you PRE-remember future incarnations? I'm having trouble grokking that (to use a Heinleinian term)!
Sean
Sean,
Beats me.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I think I can get my mind around a person claiming to remember PAST incarnations, but not someone pre-remember future incarnations his future selves NOT remembering how his past self remembered those future incarnations. Ugh, this is messy!
Sean
The "Moon Maid" premise was that time is simultaneous, with duration being an illusion -- there are physicists these days who more or less endorse that.
Most of the line of the Julians can't remember either previous or "subsequent" incarnations; the one "Burroughs" meets can do so.
The Moon Maid books bring out something that's not often realized: all Burroughs' books were set in the same imaginarium, with a coherent future history, though one embarrassingly falsified by the 1940's. Thus Tarzan and John Carter and David Innes and the rest all exist in the same timeline, and some of them meet each other -- Tarzan goes to Pellucidar in one of the books, "Tarzan at the Earth's Core". Which is actually not bad, and also contains a boffo Zeppelin-style airship, one made of a material so light and strong that it can use vacuum instead of lifting gas, which would be ideal if possible.
It also has some favorably-rendered German characters, as if to make up for the hostile portrayals he did during the war. John Buchan, the English (well, Scots, really) thriller/spy/adventure writer, did the same thing about that time. Though even in "Greenmantle", written during the war, he had some sympathetic Germans.
Mr Stirling,
And your ERBian pastiche story links Barsoom, the Moon, Pellucidar and (I think)Tarzan.
Paul.
Yup, all of them -- I couldn't figure out how to get Carson of Venus in there. A recent graphic-novel series did get all of them into the same story, though.
I suppose someone could have said that Carson Napier set off for Mars but never made it.
BEYOND THE FARTHEST STAR is also connected.
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