Hudson And Connecticut

Rip Van Winkle lives in a village near the Hudson. When Poul Anderson's Martin Saunders, in "Flight to Forever," travels into the far future and returns, his departure and return point is a house on a hill near the village of Hudson, New York. A river is visible from the hill.

Robert Heinlein's novel of suspended animation and time travel opens:

"One winter shortly before the Six Weeks War, my tomcat, Petronius the Arbiter, and I lived in an old farmhouse in Connecticut."

-Robert Heinlein, The Door Into Summer (London, 1974), One, p. 7.

I need not explain the significance either of Rip Van Winkle or of Connecticut. But it is worth noting that:

Van Winkle sleeps;

Saunders time travels;

Heinlein's Dan Davis both sleeps and time travels;

Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee both time travels and sleeps.

Twain wrote pre-Wells. Wells coined "Time Machine," "Time Traveller" and "time travelling." Twain used the term, "transposition of epochs." The Yankee returns by suspended animation.

I wanted to post about Rip Van Winkle but these few paragraphs will suffice as a post for now.

Anderson acknowledges Washington Irving and Heinlein acknowledges Twain. Heinlein also references HG Wells' The Sleeper Wakes.