A Distant Planet

In the evening, I read mainstream fiction and find remote echoes of sf. In a passage set during the period 1860-1868, the narrator, residing in the West of Ireland, reads the newspaper but:

"...I had felt so far removed from the hub of world events that the news had had as little meaning to me as the news from a distant planet."

-Susan Howatch, Cashelmara (London, 2005), II, 3, [7], p. 133.

 

A mainstream author can acknowledge the idea of news from a distant planet although such news cannot arrive during a mainstream novel! Yet those planets exist and presumably something happens on their surfaces. Poul Anderson's The High Crusade has an extra-solar spaceship landing in England in the fourteenth century but Susan Howatch's nineteenth century is safe from such incursions!