Proserpina And Dagny

At Appleby, a Romany fortune teller told me that I will live to 95, that I do a lot of work on a computer and am surrounded by books, that I should write two books and that I should have worked for Queen and Parliament.

Back home, I wander through the five-dimensional maze of Poul Anderson's future histories. "The Horn of Time the Hunter" led to Starfarers. Then the Special-X in Starfarers recalled the Intellect and other metamorphs in the Harvest Of Stars history. In Harvest The Fire, download Venator spied on Proserpinans so I now seek out the earlier history of Proserpina in The Stars Are Also Fire. In that earlier volume, human Venator spies on a Lunarian whose:

"...queries had come near the matter of Proserpina. If she reached it, that could prove deadly." (3, p. 49)

But we are not at this stage told what Proserpina is. "...the matter of Proserpina..." sounds like the Matter of Britain etc.

There is more skillful future historical writing when, at the beginning of Chapter 4, a Dagny Ebbeson meets an Edmond Beynac on the Moon. These names are significant first because we have already been told that Dagny Ebbeson is a granddaughter of Anson Guthrie and secondly because we have also been told that a Dagny Beynac will later play a major role on the Moon.

 

Poul Anderson constructs not only novelistic narratives but also centuries of fictitional history.