Although Anderson did create a detective series character, Trygve Yamamura, he did not surpass Sherlock Holmes! However, Holmesian references are an important sub-theme in Anderson's Time Patrol series. Our paperback omnibus Holmes collection disintegrated for obvious reasons but we have acquired another omnibus collecting only the Adventures, the Memoirs and the Return. I do not remember which story began with the reference to an ancient British barrow that initiated Manse Everard's first case for the Time Patrol but maybe I will find it when rereading Holmes while still laid up with a cold.
Stieg Larsson's Millennium Trilogy, which I reread like some people reread The Lord Of The Rings, includes cultural references to Mr Spock, Miss Marple and Holmes' dog that did not bark. I am drowning in literary references. The game is afoot.
3 comments:
Agreed Poul is better... but then, he had the examples to build on. Nobody stands alone.
Shoulders of giants.
Kaor, to Both!
Agreed, great men had to build on the work of past giants.
Paul: I argue that the earliest work which could rightly be called SF was not Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, but was Jonathan Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS (in 1725). Altho meant, read, and understood to be satire, Swift's work still has ideas and themes that has to be called at least proto-science fictional. And the satire in Part III, about the Academy of Lagado, satirizing the Royal Society and early scientific experiments is very proto-science fictional.
Here and there, in Anderson's stories, we can find Swiftian echoes, e.g., in "The Napoleon Crime," co-authored with Gordon Dickson.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment