Literary Dialogues

We will make our way back to "What Shall It Profit?" by Poul Anderson via Greek drama, JB Priestley and Frederik Pohl.

Something that I read about Greek drama: plays retold familiar myths. In one play, a woman recognized her returning brother on the deck of an approaching ship by the cloak that he was wearing. In a later retelling by another author, the same woman wonders whether she will recognize her brother from a distance by his cloak but then reflects that he cannot possibly still be wearing the same cloak after all these years. Thus, the second author comments on and corrects the first to the amusement of a knowing audience.

Some sf is a dialogue between authors. Robert Heinlein wrote the Future History so Poul Anderson wrote his first future history. Heinlein wrote Magic, Inc. about magic as technology so Anderson wrote Operation Chaos which develops that theme further. And so on. Sometimes sf texts are explicit about their sources:

"'Fellows like H.G. Wells have always been writing about us taking a jump into the future, to have a look at our distant descendants, but of course we don't. We can't; we don't know enough. But what about them, taking a jump into the past, to have a look at us? That's far more likely when you come to think of it.'"

-JB Priestley, "Me Strenberry's Tale" IN Peter Haining (Ed.), Timescapes: Stories of Time Travel (London, 1997), pp. 34-43 AT p. 41.

Far more likely. Poul Anderson's Manse Everard is recruited into a Time Patrol that will be founded in 19352 AD by beings from a still further future.

Incidentally, bars are good settings for short stories. Mr Strenberry tells his tall tale in one and we need not list other examples, including two in Anderson's Psychotechnic History.

When a time traveller befriends the Emperor Augustus and improves life in the first century AD, the author helpfully informs us that:

"(He stole the idea from a science-fiction novel by L. Sprague de Camp, called Lest Darkness Fall.)"

-Frederik Pohl, "The Deadly Mission of Phineas Snodgrass" IN Timescapes, pp. 151-154 AT p. 152.

Which brings us back to "What Shall It Profit?" When Barwell imagines immortals changing their names and identities every ten or twenty years in order to keep their secret, he is describing the Howard Families' "Masquerade" in Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children. Of course, Anderson's story proceeds to tell us that there is a secret about immortality but that it is nothing like what Heinlein or Barwell had imagined.

When Barwell referred to figurative chickens flying away three hundred years ago, he meant the discovery of X-rays about 1900. He looks back into a history of scientific developments that converges with ours (going backwards) in 1958. After World War III in that year, everything is different.