Multidimensionality

I have to acknowledge that a new routine of regular gym eats into time that might have gone into blogging. And other things are happening as well. There is political unrest in Britain. Both the right and the left are on the streets and I do not stay at home. We try to keep such issues, when they arise, in the combox and out of the posts. However, how (or whether) to organize society is one of the many issues addressed by Poul Anderson's imaginative fiction and we certainly do not try to dodge such questions here. What a great political novel is Mirkheim - and it is preceded by the dramatic confrontation between van Rijn and Falkayn in "Lodestar." Anderson's two most basic values are freedom and diversity.

Blog readers will gather that Anderson is one of several imaginative authors that I am rereading at present. We can imagine that all of their fictional worlds coexist in a multi-dimensional multiverse although some of the narratives are compatible with our current reality. For example, in Anderson's The Merman's Children, the realm of Faerie has almost completely withdrawn from Earth by the fourteenth century. Thus, it should be completely gone by the twenty-first century - when his History of Technic Civilization begins.