Fantasy On Iapetus

"The Saturn Game."

On the Saturnian moon, Iapetus:

"...eyes saw the vision glimmer and waver, as if it bordered on dreamland, or on Faerie. But despite all delicate intricacies, underneath was a sense of chill and of brutal mass: here dwelt also the Frost Giants." (II, p. 9)

The setting is hard sf but three of the explorers continually exercise their active imaginations. The text refers to three realms of fantasy and myth:

Shakespearian fairies exist in Poul Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest and in Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: A Midsummer Night's Dream;

the title character of The Sandman is Morpheus, Lord of the Dreaming;

Norse gods and giants exist both in Anderson's fantasies and in The Sandman.

Difficult though this is to accept when reading works like "The Saturn Game" or "Starfog," characters from Anderson's fantasies and one character from his Technic History visit a common meeting place, the inter-universal inn called the Old Phoenix, which is matched by Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End also to be found in The Sandman.