Tuesday, 9 November 2021

Alternative Fictions

Poul Anderson's Afterword to The Broken Sword ends by saying that a further story might someday be told but it never was. Robert Heinlein never wrote the Stories To Be Told in his Future History. See also SM Stirling on his Lords of Creation series here. We know of planned films that were never made.

Thus, there are not only alternative histories within the fiction that we read but also alternative fictions that we never read. The latter are collected in the Library of Dreams in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman where there are titles like:

Tarzan On Mars
Alice's Adventures Beyond The Moon
The Emperor Over The Sea
 
Imagine one. It is there.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And Tolkien even wrote a fragment of one of those "new stories," called "The New Shadow," set a century after the death of King Elessar. Alas, he discarded it because it was turning into a "thriller," a kind of story Tolkien disliked.

Back in 1985 I wrote a long and enthusiastic letter about Anderson's THE GAME OF EMPIRE, and in his reply Anderson wrote he rather hated not planning to write any more stories showing us Diana Crowfeather--but he wanted to go on to other ideas and themes. Apparently, he did have the idea of writing more Technic stories in mind.

And of course I have mentioned how I would have liked reading a Young Nick story, or one showing us Dominic Flandry in his old age, around 100.

Ad astra! Sean