Svoboda (and see here) had never found time to get a prosthetic foot because:
"You had to run pretty fast just to stay where you were." (p. 8)
See the Red Queen's race, to which Anderson obviously refers. (Indeed, reading on, we find that he explicitly refers to "Alice" in the very next sentence.)
"The Red Queen's Race," a time travel story by Isaac Asimov (see here), is much more coherent than his time travel novel, The End Of Eternity, and is discussed here.
I do not expect, when turning the page, to find a single sentence that generates references to both Lewis Carroll and Isaac Asimov but this is one good reason to read Poul Anderson.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
In other words Poul Anderson was a very cultured man well able to deftly and smoothly scatter literary allusions thru out his stories.
And we see Dominic Flandry mentioning the Red King's dream on Wayland in A CIRCUS OF HELLS. Another Carrollian allusion!
Sean
Paul:
While it's not the same thing, really, I'm reminded of a poem by cartoonist Walt Kelly:
What kind of a game
Where direction's the same;
You run and you race,
You wind up on your face;
You slide a la carte,
And you clutch at your heart;
You're at the right place,
But you're back at the start.
The accompanying illustrations show that Kelly's character Pogo just made it around the baseball diamond.
(I may be incorrect on some words and punctuation in the poem; it's been more than four decades since I read it.)
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