Another late night connection between different branches of fiction:
"'So long as that rogue Parnell tells the peasants they have a moral right to refuse to pay rent there'll be no peace here or anywhere else in Ireland.'"
-Susan Howatch, Cashelmara (London, 2005), IV, 3, [2], p. 354.
The nineteenth century Irish politician, Charles Stewart Parnell, was a guest in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix and as such has received extensive previous blog coverage. See here. (Scroll down.)
This reminds me of a similar situation elsewhere. In a single week, the same actor played Charles Dickens both in a TV drama about the writer's life and in an episode of Doctor Who when the time traveling Doctor met Dickens while visiting the nineteenth century.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And in the Time Patrol stories we see Manse Everard meeting King Hiram of Tyre and King Roger I of Sicily. But Anderson tended to be fairly sparing about having his Time Patrolers actually meeting really prominent characters from the past.
Ad astra! Sean
It’s logical. Really prominent people are more likely to disturb the course of events if influenced,despite the inertia of events; just think of the decisions that Churchill or Lenin made. They’re also more likely to sense something ‘off’ and it matters more if they do — as witness the danger of ‘the detective’ in the first story deducing time travel from the odd metallic box in the Anglo -Saxon burial mound!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And I agree it would make sense for wiser time travelers to work hard at being inconspicuous.
That was basically what the "immortals" of THE BOAT OF A MILLION YEARS did, try to stay quietly in the background. We see Hanno the Phoenician making two exceptions to that rule, one accidental and one on purpose. The accidental case was Pharaoh Psammetichus I (XXVI Dynasty), accidentally discovering Hanno's secret, and persuaded him trust him. The second being when Hanno deliberately met Cardinal Richelieu, to ask for his help in finding more immortals.
Ad astra! Sean
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