Thursday 24 February 2022

Maurai And Kith

We read the second Maurai story, "Progress," as a work of fiction. There Will Be Time enables us to reread it as a work of fiction that is written, but also based on some future historical facts, in the timeline of There Will Be Time just as, in the Technic History timeline, some installments of The Earth Book Of Stormgate are works of fiction or fictionalized accounts of historical events.

Poul Anderson's Maurai and Kith Histories are surprisingly similar in structure. Although three Maurai and two Kith stories were collected as Maurai And Kith, a third Kith story was written later. Each of the series is a short but genuine future history with installments set generations or centuries apart. In both cases, a novel not fully consistent with the short stories was added later although the Kith novel incorporates revised versions of the first and third stories of that series.

Uniquely, however, the Maurai History is linked to the time travel novel, There Will Be Time.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Anderson thought at first of including in that later novel a revision of "The Horn of Time the Hunter," but his wife persuaded him that would have been too dark an addition. It does make me wonder how different "Horn" would have been from such a hypothetical revision?

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,

Kith is one history that exists in 2 different versions with different culminations.

Paul.

Nicholas D.Rosen said...

Kaor, Paul and Sean!

It occurs to me that the events of “The Horn of Time the Hunter” could take place in the same universe as the later and more optimistic Kith novel, the title of which escapes me for the moment. While one expedition is meeting extraterrestrials, visiting a black hole, and then returning to Earth and its vicinity, Jong Errafrans and his shipmates could visit a different human-colonized world elsewhere.

Best Regards p,
Nicholas

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Nicholas!

I'm trying to remember, isn't "The Horn of Time the Hunter" set about 20,000 years from more or less our AD 2200? If so, that would be long after "Envoy" had returned to Earth,"only" about 10,000 years from now. What might Jong and his friends have found after returning to Earth?

With STL relativistic space traveling, you have to think really big when it comes to the TIMING.

Best regards! Sean