First Appearances And First Meetings

First appearances overlap with first meetings. Watson's first meeting with Holmes is Holmes' first appearance. Holmes and Watson are always relevant to Poul Anderson because they gave Everard his first Time Patrol case.

I started to think about first appearances through rereading Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, as mentioned in Back To Uppsala.

"The trial was irretrievably over; everything that could be said had been said; but he had never doubted that he would lose...
"Carl Mikael Blomkvist saw [the reporters] through the doorway and slowed his step."
-Stieg Larsson, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo (London, 2008), CHAPTER 1, p. 9.

"[Dragan Armansky] glanced suspiciously at his colleague, Lisbeth Salander, who was thirty-two years his junior."
-CHAPTER 2, p. 32.

On p. 51, Salander reports to Armansky and their client on Blomkvist's relationship with Erika Berger, then p. 52 begins, "Erika Berger looked up..." - as Blomkvist entered her office.

If we know these characters, then we really do appreciate rereading their first appearances.

Because many universally known characters, Sherlock Holmes, Superman etc, are older than us, we heard of them before we read them and probably do not remember when we first heard of them although, in Holmes' case, I do. These characters are part of us. We would not be who we are without them.