"The Queen of Air and Darkness" and MIDSUMMER CENTURY

"The Queen of Air and Darkness" by Poul Anderson and Midsummer Century by James Blish have much in common.

(i) Each was written for a special issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction published to honour the author in question.

(ii) Each is perhaps a "novella" in length.

(iii) Anderson wrote of "The Queen..." that, although it is hard sf:

"...the story embodies immemorial fantasy motifs and seeks to create an atmosphere of faery lands forlorn."

-Poul Anderson, The Armies Of Elfland (New York, May 1992), p. 1.

(iv) Blish said of ...Century that he deliberately wrote it in an old style of sf where the viewpoint character must start in the author's and readers' here and now before being whisked off to another time or place.

(v) Anderson connected "The Queen..." to his Rustum History.

(vi) Blish incorporated ...Century into his Haertel Scholium by making it a companion volume to The Quincunx Of Time, the expanded version of "Beep," which he was writing at the same time. (If the publisher had complained of the brevity of Quincunx..., then Blish would have offered ...Century to be published in the same volume.)

(vii) The two FSF covers are designed on the same model.