Some Further Reflections On Textuality

In Poul Anderson's Technic History, The Man Who Counts is a historical novel so it is someone else's imagining of what van Rijn, Wace, some Diomedeans etc thought, felt, said and did. In particular, the thoughts and conversations must be fictions within the fiction. A hypothetical sequel with van Rijn reminiscing about his experiences on Diomedes might present a different perspective on events. This could include differences of opinion about matters of fact between different narrators. Look around the world for examples of that now! Without becoming embroiled here and now in any current conflicts, we can nevertheless draw attention to the continuing relevance of good sf. Intelligent beings responding to their natural and social environments should be relevant to other intelligent beings in other environments. It is an sf writer's job to imagine how different they might be.

In Ian Fleming's The Spy Who Loved Me, the first person narrator/heroine, with help from Fleming, tells us what Bond had told her that he had believed to be the case at the time when they met so there is plenty of scope for a gap between the original "facts" and narrative as it comes to us! - which could help to iron out some prima facie inconsistences between this volume and the next.