"'...hear about the latest adventure of the fabulous Muddlin' Through team...'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT I, p. 33.
They were the same stories but to her they were real.
When she was adolescent, she heard that her grandfather and the Muddlin' Through team had prevented a war with a nonhuman species and she began to worship Falkayn. When she matured and had occasional outings with him, the god became a man while remaining a god.
Then she married him and joined the team. We read only about the modest dinner that van Rijn threw for them both before her first expedition. Then they started a family and "...stopped space roving." (ibid., p. 34) (The Time Patrol series has time rovers.)
Thus things stand in Mirkheim, I. Now the reconvened team must embark on another mission and try to prevent another war and again without Coya who is pregnant for the second time. Her knowledge of the team has paralleled ours but we have read fictional stories whereas she has heard true stories and, while we were reading The Trouble Twisters, we did not suspect that she even existed. Several of the stories gain altered perspectives when they are fitted into the History.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
While we often say we HEARD about thing or events happening to other persons and places, I think it's more accurate to say, literally, that we READ about them in either public news reports or in private reports of the kind Old Nick would get from his agents. I would not be surprised if van Rijn, on noticing Coya's interest, often allowed her to read confidential reports from David Falkayn and his team.
Sean
Sean,
You have caught up with the blog. There will be no more posts for eight or so hours.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Sometimes it's hard to catch up with you! Because you are so active a blog poster!
And, to get back to what I talked about in my first comment, it was amusing to see in MIRKHEIM Chee Lan reading the LONDON TIMES in a kind of train. I think Chee Lan purchased a "print on demand" copy of the daily issue of the TIMES.
Sean
Sean,
It was in a plane.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Dang! My memory was at fault! What I most strongly recalled, of course, was the LONDON TIMES still existing in c. AD 2500.
Started reading Beth Shapiro's popular science book HOW TO CLONE A MAMMOTH. I want to get some idea of the real science in cloning. I also ordered a copy of Frank Tipler's THE PHYSICS OF CHRISTIANITY (because of the comments he left at John Wright's blog commenting on his article about time travel SF). And we both know Tipler was an inspiration for Anderson's THE AVATAR.
Sean
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