Comparison And Contrast With Non-Fiction

Other reading always illuminates.

Non-fiction records reality whereas fiction merely reflects it. Thus, an investigative journalist writes a book about a recent event. He refers to then Prime Minister Tony Blair among many other real people. We all (?) remember Blair and can confirm his existence and activities by consulting many printed or on-line sources, not just this single book - which I recommend. Indeed, Blair has been represented on screen by an amazing number of actors. I cannot find any total number. Dramatizations and docudramas are sources of information although they must be checked against nonfictional sources.

Poul Anderson writes a series of narratives of different lengths about fictional future events. He refers to two public figures among many other fictional characters. We have never heard of either of these two figures before reading Anderson's accounts of them and these accounts are our only sources of information about these characters although we must imagine that other people living in the same fictional timeline would have access to multiple, multi-media sources comparable to ours about Blair.

Freelady Hanny Lennart, a vice president of Global Cybernetics, is described as the guiding genius of the Home Companies which is one of the two cartels that have coalesced within the Polesotechnic League. As such, she converses with Nicholas van Rijn twice - in our hearing, I mean. Later:

"...serving the [Solar] Commonwealth at a credit a year as Special Assistant Minister of Extrasolar Relations..."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim (Riverdale, NY, March, 2011), pp. 1-291, AT XIV, p. 195 -

- Lennart converses twice with Admiral Eric Tamarin-Asmundsen of the Hermetian Space Navy. 

If I have overlooked any details about Lennart, then they are to be found in Mirkheim because that is the only work in which she appears or indeed is mentioned.

Brechdan Ironrede, the Hand of the Vach Ynvory, is the Protector of the Roidhun's Grand Council and appears only in Ensign Flandry although he is mentioned twice later. Those works are our only sources on Brechdan.

Two important figures: how much must be known about them in their periods and in later history? Any author who sets out to compile a history of Anderson's Technic History will have to absorb every minute datum in Anderson's texts and might also have to improvise some more whereas the main task for a biographer of Blair has to be selection. Fiction mirrors reality but cannot reproduce its detail or complexity. 

Today, we braved the elements for a Unity march with band and banners along Morecambe Promenade so I come late in the day to blogging.