Books Within Books

In Poul Anderson's History of Technic Civilization, we read The Earth Book Of Stormgate about how human beings came to Avalon but not The Sky Book Of Stormgate about how Ythrians came to the shared planet. The Technic History also quotes from a few other sources.

The archives of Anderson's Time Patrol include histories of prevented timelines and an alternative version of Tacitus' Histories.

SM Stirling shows us a few chilling passages from the main work by the leading Draka philosopher. See here.

Dornford Yates's Pleydells have The History Of The Pleydell Family which goes back at least to the seventeenth century and quotes from Samuel Pepys' Diaries.

Thus, these three authors carry us backwards, forwards and sideways in time and a fictional book in a fictional narrative refers to a real book, by Pepys, whereas a timeline very like ours - the one protected by the Time Patrol - contains a book by Tacitus that he never wrote and also "...the lost narratives of Dr. Watson..." (Time Patrol, p. 55) which are true accounts of "The private agent..." (p. 25) whereas, in Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers, those same narratives are fictions set in an alternative history where Earth was not struck by asteroids in the late nineteenth century. Life and fiction find curious ways to interact.

I cannot help thinking that the blog accesses strange spaces - following the best of guides, of course. I had no idea where this post was going when I started it.