"Poul Anderson immerses you in the future....Anderson puts you into a whole new world."
-Larry Niven, back cover blurb ON Poul Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010).
I agree with Niven and have tried to convey that sense of immersion on this blog. In PART THREE of The Shield Of Time, Anderson immerses us in a past epoch, the Oligocene, as experienced by two time travelers. When Wanda Tamberly sees wolf-hound-sized animals with:mottled coats;
trifurcate hoofs;
eerily equine heads -
- she thinks that they might be intermediate between miohippus and mesohippus.
Her companion, Tu Sequeira, born on Mars in the Solar Commonwealth, prepares to study early spaceflight. Again, this might remind some readers of a comic book in which a superhero from a millennium hence travels to the twentieth century for this purpose.
Writers can obliquely reference their own other works. Anderson does this with "Solar Commonwealth" here and with "Planetary Engineers" in "The Year of the Ransom."
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, I thought as well of the TECHNIC Solar Commonwealth you cited here. But I missed Anderson obliquely referring to other works of his during the times I read "The Year of the Ransom."
Another interesting idea, that PA sometimes obliquely refers to others of his works in more than one of his stories.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
It is not in "The Year of the Ransom," after all.
Everard to Wanda:
"'Too bad you didn't draw a hotshot glamour boy, like maybe from the Planetary Engineers milieu.'"
THE SHIELD OF TIME, 1987 A.D., p. 32.
Other examples:
CS Lewis' THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH obliquely refers to his THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE;
James Blish's THE QUINCUNX OF TIME obliquely refers to his CITIES IN FLIGHT.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
At least I have read THE SHIELD OF TIME and THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH. So I hope I remember to notice such details the next time I read those books.
Ad astra! Sean
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