Cross-Time Anachronisms

"The reporter was a photographer too, carrying the latest digital model. To Tom's eyes it clashed horribly with the suit and snap-brimmed fedora and pencil-thin trimmed mustache; it was like a computer terminal in It Happened One Night."
-SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004), Chapter Seventeen, pp. 419-420.

(I had never heard of It Happened One Night and have thought to google it only on the second reading of this novel.)

The reporter's style might be time warp stuff but his camera is an anachronism - wrong time stuff. But this is going to happen if we ever have this kind of cross-time travel.

I read that one Batman TV animated series had styles of clothes, cars etc from the late 1930s when Batman started but also had up-to-date information and computer technology: a synthesis of nostalgic period charm dated-ness with real time cutting edge-ness, easily rationalized by saying that the series is set on an alternative Earth.

Am I lingering too long on the minute details of one novel? Certainly not. A dense and rich text invites total immersion of its readers in its fictional world. It is clear that we have in no way exhausted the wealth of the Commonwealth of New Virginia.

Clever Uses Of Language

SM Stirling, Drakon (New York, 2000).

Our NYPD detective, Henry Carmaggio, refers to his futurian ally's workroom as "'...the Fortress of Solitude...'" (p. 319) and addresses him ironically as "'...Batman...'" (p. 321) These similarities to comic book characters and settings are clearly present. Thus, it is appropriate that they are acknowledged.

When Henry meets the Draka super-villainness, Gwen, her eyes are:

"...full of an ancient, innocent evil." (p. 348)

Ancient, yes. Both she and the Domination are several centuries old. But innocent evil? Literally, a contradiction. However, appropriate. Like a child torturing an animal, Gwen enjoys killing human beings and thinks that she is right to do so. Thus, about as unrepentantly evil as we can possibly imagine.

Poul Anderson On Comics

Poul Anderson wrote many works of fiction in prose but not in the visual media of cinema or comic books. I have found three references to comics in his novels.

(i) In There Will Be Time, time traveller Jack Havig comments that, despite Superman's telephone kiosk, the most convenient place in a modern city for a time traveller to disappear is a public toilet cubicle.

Greek dramatists sometimes commented on and corrected errors or implausibilities in the works of their predecessors. In this vein, in the first Superman film, Clark Kent, responding to an emergency, approaches a public telephone that is not even enclosed in a kiosk, realises that it would afford him no privacy for a costume change and instead uses a revolving door at super speed.

Thus, the film, like Anderson, comments on a familiar scene from earlier Superman comics.

(ii) In Operation Luna (New York, 2000), Steve Matuchek remarks:

"It's only comic-book heroes and their ilk who bounce directly from one brush with death to the next, wisecracking along the way. Real humans react to such things." (pp. 158-159)

Yes, real humans in real life and in realistically written novels or comics. There is nothing in the latter medium that obliges that it be written unrealistically.

(iii) Matuchek also speaks against vigilantism even if conducted in "...comic book costumes" (p. 140). Right. Again, comics comment on earlier comics. Frank Miller's Batman is a vigilante wanted for assault, breaking and entering, child endangerment and, when the Joker's dead body has been found, murder. In Alan Moore's Watchmen, the public demonstrates and the police strike ("Badges, not Masks") until anonymous vigilantism is banned. In Garth Ennis' The Boys, superheroes are untrained and get a lot of people killed on 9/11. So the critique of comic book implausibilities is conducted in comics.

I would like to see high quality film and graphic adaptations of Anderson's works.

Later: For a fourth reference to comics, see here.