Losers' Night II

Not remembering how much of Poul Anderson's "Losers' Night" I had read last night, I have just read the whole story through again from the beginning. It is as relaxing as a visit to the inn even though the conversations touch on difficult issues. It would be possible to google Winston Churchill's biography to ascertain which period of his life is represented here. From what both he and the narrator say, it would seem to be between the Wars, which would mean that he took up painting and bricklaying at that stage, not, as I would have thought, later - but this can be googled, or someone who knows more about Churchill's life might comment?

This story is like the summit of the parallel universes/Old Phoenix sequence because it refers to:

Valeria Matuchek of Operation Chaos and Operation Luna;
Holger Dansk of Three Hearts And Three Lions;
Prince Rupert of A Midsummer Tempest;
Huck Finn who is in the Old Phoenix inn at the end of A Midsummer Tempest;
the Abelard who visited the inn in "House Rule" -

- and I need only add that Matuchek, Dansk and Rupert meet in the Old Phoenix in A Midsummer Tempest to show how these three novels and six stories hang together. (I am reckoning Operation Chaos as four stories rather than as one novel.) In fact, they make as substantial a sequence of volumes as the King of Ys, Time Patrol, Technic Civilization or Harvest of Stars, and deserve to be packaged as such in Poul Anderson's Complete Works.

Losers' Night

Returning to Poul Anderson's collection All One Universe, I had intended to reread some items that have not been mentioned on this blog as yet but first was drawn back into rereading "Losers' Night," although this has been discussed in relation to other Old Phoenix and parallel universe stories.

Every word of the story is perfect:

how the narrator finds the inn on a country road at night;
the signboard creaking in the wind;
the bronze elephant's head handle;
the interior of the inn, which I described in an earlier post.

We might expect the narrator to meet someone who recounts a single story to him and thus also to us. Instead, this is like a real night at the Old Phoenix. We read snatches of conversation, some that the narrator engages in and others that he overhears. We easily recognize two famous political leaders from different parts of the British Isles although one is not named and the other not till the end.

Francois Villon composes verses about Harald Hardrada and Simon Bolivar, thus echoing two other works by Anderson, and we understand that, on a previous night at the Old Phoenix, Villon had not interacted amicably with Kit Marlowe.

It is getting late so I will finish reading tomorrow. 

The Valeria Matuchek Trilogy

It is almost a trilogy.

Volume I
In Poul Anderson's Operation Chaos, Valeria's parents meet and marry. Valeria is born and grows to the age of three. A demon kidnaps her but her parents rescue her from Hell.

Volume II
In Anderson's Operation Luna, Valeria turns fifteen and is the first human being on the Moon in her timeline.

Volume III
In his A Midsummer Tempest, Valeria, now a graduate student travelling between timelines, advises other travellers, including Holger Danske from Three Hearts And Three Lions, whom she meets in the inter-cosmic inn.

Epilogues
In "House Rule," we meet a regular of the inter-cosmic inn.

In "Losers' Night," the regular lists spectacular women including Moll Flanders, Sojourner Truth and Valeria Matuchek.

The writing order of the Volumes was I, III, II so Anderson filled in an account of Valeria's teenage years after he had included the adult Valeria as a supporting character in A Midsummer Tempest.

Maybe her flight to the Moon qualified her as a spectacular woman or perhaps there was more later? We would like to know the rest of her career but, as far as it goes, this trilogy, or tetralogy if we include Three Hearts And Three Lions, and its Epilogues is already a comprehensive, and not merely linear, narrative sequence.