What Is Coming

Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973).

Robert Anderson addresses Poul Anderson:

"And when last I saw him, our talk turned on the probable shape of our future, and suddenly he exclaimed, 'Oh, God, the young, the poor young! Poul, my generation and yours have had it outrageously easy. All we ever had to do was be white Americans in reasonable health, and we got our place in the sun. But now history's returning to its normal climate here also, and the norm is an ice age.' He tossed off a glass and poured a refill more quickly than was his wont. 'The tough and lucky will survive,' he said. 'The rest...will have had what happiness was granted them. A medical man ought to be used to that kind of truth, right?' And he changed the subject."

-Foreword, p. 6.

 

Jack Havig addresses Robert Anderson:

 

"'Doc,' he said most quietly, 'consider yourself fortunate. You're already getting old.'

"'I'll be dead, then?' My heart stumbled.

"'By the time of the breakdown and blowup, no doubt. I haven't checked, except I did establish you're alive and healthy in 1970.'"

-IV, p. 42.

 

(1970 was in the past when the novel was published.)

 

Duncan Reid identifies himself to a dying futurian:

 

"'Duncan Reid, American, from 1970 - latter twentieth century - well, we'd lately made the first lunar landings, and we'd had atomic energy for, uh, twenty-five years -'

"'So. I see. Shortly before the Age of - no, I shouldn't say. You might get back. Will, if I can help it. You'd not like to know what's coming.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Dancer From Atlantis (London, 1977), CHAPTER FOUR, p. 32.

 

What do we make of these remarks? We will consider them shorty. In Anderson's Technic History, Hloch of Stormgate Choth sees the shadow of God the Hunter across the future.