Rip Van Winkle

 

I have just read Washington Irving's "Rip Van Winkle" for the first time in my life. We notice:

the kind of vivid description of the colours of nature that we on this blog appreciate in Poul Anderson's works;

that there is a whole narrative about Van Winkle as a person and about his home life of which we are unaware until we read the story;

that this story must surely count as precursor of later works about suspended animation or futureward time travel.

Some modern fictional characters have become myths. By this I mean that they are universally recognized even by those who have not read the original work. A second criterion might be that the essence of the character can be summarized in a single phrase, e.g.:

he is a great detective;

she entered a mad world through a rabbit hole;

he did not grow up;

he was raised by apes;

he slept for twenty years;

he fights crime dressed as a bat;

he is strong, flies and is "American pie";

he is an alien and logical;

he animated a corpse;

he drinks blood;

he made himself invisible;

he talks to animals.

Once, in a private correspondence, I listed over a hundred. How many sf characters are on this list? Some of Wells'. None of Poul Anderson's. Perhaps Nicholas van Rijn is widely known among sf readers by the description:

he is a flamboyant interstellar trader.

Successful films of Anderson's works would make van Rijn and other characters more widely known but the books have not yet had this effect although they definitely deserve to be more widely circulated.