Rereading Alan Moore's excellent Superman stories, we are reminded that superheroes grew out of sf but soon became a hybrid genre, also incorporating fantasy. Aliens met magicians and ghosts. Poul Anderson wrote sf and fantasy but kept scientifically based and magically based characters in parallel universes. Nicholas van Rijn appeared in the Old Phoenix, briefly and surprisingly, but magic would have been an unwelcome, indeed impossible, intrusion in "Starfog," where all that matters is the laws of physics.
Alan Moore wraps everything up into a single package:
"'Magic' lake water
"(Probable unidentified radiation source.)"
-Alan Moore, Superman: Whatever Happened To The Man Of Tomorrow? (New York, 1997), p. 31, panel 4.
CS Lewis' Elwin Ransom met, on Mars, beings that were both extraterrestrial and supernatural. Keeping these two categories apart is:
"...false security..."
-CS Lewis, Perelandra IN Lewis, The Cosmic Trilogy (London, 1990), pp. 145-348 AT 1, p. 151.
Maybe. Maybe we will find out.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm simply very glad Anderson did not try to morph together two such different timelines as the Technic stories with the OPERATION books/THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS/A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST timelines. It would have been so horribly easy to make a ghastly mess of all of them.
Ad astra! Sean
The slight connection between them is just right. Most of the time, these universes go about their own affairs without any reference to any of the others.
From Sean M. Brooks:
Kaor, Paul!
Meaning the brief glimpse we get of Old Nick in "House Rule." I agree.
Hmm, but Manuel Argos and Dominic Flandry would be worthy guests at the Old Phoenix. But, probably better to leave with that glimpse of Old Nick.
Ad astra! Sean
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