Narrators Who Address Us

I wanted to expand on what I had meant in the previous post about narrators who come across as writers of popular magazine articles. There are several examples in Narrators That Are In There. Two others are:

"Sure we had trouble building Space Station One - but the trouble was people."

-Robert Heinlein, "Delilah and the Space Rigger" IN Heinlein, The Green Hills Of Earth (London, 1967), pp. 7-19 AT p. 7.

"This is the story of Rhysling, the Blind Singer of the Spaceways - but not the official version.

"You sang his words in school..."

-Robert Heinlein, "The Green Hills of Earth" IN The Green Hills Of Earth, pp. 131-141 AT p. 131.

The text continues to address its readers as if we were living in that era when Space Station One had recently been built and Rhysling's songs were sung in schools. Heinlein gives the future a daily life more solidly than anyone else although Anderson also approaches this same effect in works like "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" and "Lodestar."

Future histories affect each other - and Nicholas van Rijn and "blind Rhysling" both make it into Anderson's inter-universal inn, the Old Phoenix: an ultimate recognition of these two characters.