Unbounded Darkness

"Star of the Sea," 6.

I have quoted the following passage before. It is one of Poul Anderson's finest.

"The Ambrosia dealt in Surinam-Caribbean food. On Stadhouderskade, in a quiet neighborhood near the Museumplein, it was intimate, right on a canal. Besides the pretty waitress, the black cook came forth to discuss their meal with them beforehand in fluent English. The wine was just right, too. Maybe the sense of evanescence, this warmth and light and savor no more than a moment in an unbounded darkness, something that could come to never having been, gave depth to pleasure." (p. 522)

This reads like a real experience.

The concluding sentence is a culmination of a pulp sf tradition in which time travellers change the past so that only they remember that which, to everyone else, has never been. But only Poul Anderson created an organization and a series based on that tradition.

The "unbounded darkness" recalls the "night and chaos of time" in Anderson's "Flight to Forever."

Three top stories by Anderson:

"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" shows domestic life during the Solar Commonwealth, just as it was said that Robert Heinlein's Future History gave the future a daily life;

"Lodestar" shows social change in the Solar Commonwealth through the prism of the generation gap between van Rijn and his granddaughter;

"Star of the Sea" shows us, among several other things, late twentieth century Amsterdam.