Someone who borrowed
Guardians Of Time said, "Other time travel writers just tell us that a character is in a particular past time but Anderson makes it real." His time travel fiction includes historical fiction. Jack Havig travels from the Eyrie in the twenty-first century to Constantinople in the thirteenth century. The text becomes rich in multi-sensory details. New characters live: the Constantinoplean family that Jack visits as Hauk Thomasson, a trader from Scandinavia.
Should sf writers link their time travel to their future histories? Heinlein and Asimov did it badly. Anderson did not link his long Time Patrol series to his longer Technic History but did link his short Maurai History to his single novel, There Will Be Time. This works.
We know of:
Constaninople from history;
the Maurai Federation from two other volumes by Anderson;
the Eyrie from There Will Be Time -
- and There Will Be Time pulls them all into a coherent narrative.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
But we should remember Anderson warned his readers ORION SHALL RISE is not wholly consistent with the Maurai short stories (and hence THERE WILL BE TIME). Aside from that, I agree his linking of the Maurai stories, THERE WILL BE TIME, and ORION was mostly successful.
And one premise of the Maurai stories was a mistake: metals becoming prohibitively rare and costly. But why that was an error has been discussed elsewhere!
Ad astra! Sean
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