Stories Within Stories

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, in Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End and in two of Poul Anderson's Nicholas van Rijn stories, the characters sit comfortably, indeed share a drink, while one of their number recounts the story that is to be told. It is a comfortable experience to read a story narrated in this manner.

We vicariously share in the characters' comfort and security and expect to rejoin them in their comfortable environment at the end of the story even though, in media res, the perspective shifts from the point of view of those who are hearing the story to that of one of the participants in the adventurous activities being recounted although, obviously, someone who has lived to tell the story cannot be a fatality within it.

Nicholas van Rijn embarks on adventures in several of the stories in the History of Technic Civilization. However, in two he instead sits at home, hears the story recounted by someone else and, of course, makes relevant comments when it is finished. In "The Master Key," the detective skills that are part of his character are applied to the experiences of others just as, on other occasions, they are applied to his own. The reader should notice the colorful details that are described not only in the exotic environments that are the scenes of the stories but also in van Rijn's home environment, a penthouse with a garden on the roof of a skyscraper in a major city of flying cabs and cars.

Narratives And Their Conclusions

The nature of a narrative is shown by the kind of climax or conclusion to which it leads. I concurrently reread Poul Anderson's Matuchek/Old Phoenix sequence and Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994) because both series have an inter-cosmic inn.

These four Anderson novels each have a foregone conclusion: the triumph of good over evil. Three Hearts And Three Lions does not describe its climactic battle, just the hero setting off to it. Operation Luna ends with a battle against demons. In each individual skirmish, a good guy dispatches a demon until the demonic survivors flee. Hardly surprising. In Black Easter, James Blish simply reverses this conclusion: the demons win Armageddon.

Worlds' End tells different kinds of stories with a different kind of ending. The "handsome cabin boy" ends her story by saying that she will continue to masquerade as a boy as long as she can:

" '...for now - - you can call me Jim.' " (p. 90)

Brant Tucker narrates from the first word and we assume that he directly addresses the reader. To our surprise, on the last two pages, 161-162, he is seen to be addressing a bar maid in an otherwise empty bar. The conclusion is them saying, "Good night," and him walking away down a dark city street. We are left to reflect on their lives.

Between Worlds

When a character moves between worlds, how does the author describe the transition? Sometimes, the character imagines another world, then enters it - and later wonders whether it was real - but usually the other world is unequivocally real. I will mention only a few examples from the works of three fantasy writers, CS Lewis, Poul Anderson and Neil Gaiman.

Lewis' most famous entrance to another world is a wardrobe but there is a better example in a later book. The characters look at a painting of the ship the Dawn Treader until it seems that the waves are moving, then they fall into the sea and are rescued by the ship's crew. Lewis never explains how a painting of a contemporary Narnian ship came to hang in an English house.

The hero of Poul Anderson's Three Hearts And Three Lions, fighting Nazis on a Danish beach, finds himself in the Carolingian mythological universe. Later, mission accomplished in that universe, he returns to the Danish beach with no loss of time, like a returned ruler of Narnia.

In Anderson's A Midsummer Tempest (London, 1975), Puck tells Prince Rupert of the Rhine's companion, Will Fairweather:

"'...to speak of inns and such - My friend, if sorely pressed for shelter, think of this. There is a tavern known as the old Phoenix, which none may see nor enter who're not touched by magic in some way. It flits about, but maybe you can use his ring to find it, or even draw a door towards yourselves...'" (pp. 55-56) (Oberon and Titania have given Rupert a magic ring.)

Sure enough, the ring lights the way to the inn which appears before Rupert and Will although it remains invisible to their Puritan pursuers. A regular of the Old Phoenix tells us:

"Look for it anywhere, anytime, by day, by dusk, by night, up an ancient alley or in a forest where hunters whose eyes no spoor can escape nonetheless pass it by unseeing...you must be alert for its fleeting presence..." (Anderson, "House Rule" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), p. 9).

This regular finds it many times, once unbelievably on ship at sea, another time more reasonably on a country road after dark where he knows that:

"The inn might waver from sight at any instant." (Anderson, "Losers' Night" IN All One Universe (New York, 1996), p. 107)

It sounds like Neil Gaiman's Inn of the Worlds' End:

"Up the lane aways is the Inn. You just have to be SURE it's there, though. If you AREN'T sure, then fizzlywinks, it's only goin to be fireflies and treeses" (Gaiman, Neil, The Sandman: Worlds' End (New York, 1994), p. 22.

One Worlds' End guest enters it in stages. Brant Tucker is driving to Chicago at night on the interstate. So far then he is travelling though not as yet between worlds. (However, his Earth is that of the DC Universe where anything not only can happen but routinely does happen.) Then:

he was very tired, so did he dream everything that followed?;
he didn't think it was weird when it started to snow in June;
a large, strange animal ran in front of the car (we see this since we are reading graphic fiction);
the car went off the road, across a field, down a hill and into an oak tree;
Brant, carrying his unconscious co-driver, Charlene Mooney, could not find the road;
he was directed to the Inn by an apparently disembodied voice (see above - the reader realises that the speaker is a hedgehog; regular readers recognise the speaking hedgehog from Gaiman's The Books of Magic);
Brant finds a country road;
at the end of the road, is a light;
first it is fireflies in a hedge, then it is the Inn.

I think that the transition between realities began with the apparent snow storm which, we learn, was a reality storm, stranding travellers from many realms in the Inn. A sailor's account is different:

"Y'see, there was a storm, come up out of nowhere at midnight - - we were swept onto the rocks where there shouldn't've been rocks neither, nohow." (p. 67)

Brant and the sailor then disagree about whether the date is June, 1993, or September, 1914.

And a Necropolitan says:

" 'A dark thunderstorm arose suddenly, and the brougham in which my companions and I were travelling was washed into a river.' " (p. 42)

Making an ordinary journey seems to be the beginning of the process.

The landlady explains:

"This place is the Inn at the end of all worlds. None of you were BROUGHT here. Each of you was travelling, and was caught in an unseasonable storm of some kind. You made your way here by luck, and took refuge and advantage of the hospitality offered. And you WILL leave here, when the storm is over." (p. 139)

However, Charlene is allowed to stay to work in the Inn and we see her there in a later series, The Furies by Mike Carey. The characters offer different theories about what causes a reality storm. A common feature of the Old Phoenix and the Worlds' End is the telling of stories and some of these stories offer other routes between worlds:

"...the silver road...glittered and glimmered away beyond a street market." (Gaiman, p. 29)

The man who sees the silver road works in an office in a modern city where gravestones can have "...letters from forgotten alphabets..." (p. 28). That odd touch, if taken literally, means that the modern city is certainly not on any Earth like ours. The narrator of this story asks:

"Is there any person in the world who does not dream? Who does not contain within them worlds unimagined?" (p. 28)

And that is where the other worlds are.

A Midsummer Tempest X

Poul Anderson's inn between worlds is called "the Old Phoenix." Neil Gaiman's is called "the Inn of the Worlds' End." Both names mean an ending. "The Old Phoenix" also implicitly means a re-beginning. Less overtly, "Worlds' End" also means a new beginning. The Inn itself is maintained and renewed by the continual ending of worlds. It is one of several "free houses" owing no allegiance to any realm so these could include the Old Phoenix.

House rules differ. Guests stay for only one night at a time in the Old Phoenix. In both, stories are told. The Worlds' End is a Chaucerian framing device whereas the Old Phoenix is an interlude in a novel, A Midsummer Tempest, and the setting for two short stories. The Old Phoenix landlord is a hospitable gentleman whereas the Worlds' End landlady is an Indian woman who, we come to realise, is Kali.

I imagine another inn where people have ended a journey. In Anderson's "Delenda Est," the Time Patrol deletes a timeline in which Carthage won the Second Punic War. I argue on my "Logic of Time Travel" blog that, when the Patrol "deletes," as they see it, a timeline, that timeline does not cease to exist from the point of view of its inhabitants. Either it simply does not exist (the potential timeline in which I remained a bachelor was prevented when I married) or it does exist as experienced by those in it.

If there is a temporal axis along which it would be true to say that the Carthaginian timeline had existed but now no longer exists, then that temporal axis is at right angles to the timeline itself. Therefore, the cessation of the timeline's existence is not an event on the timeline. If people lived in it, then, from their point of view, they continue to live in it. So I imagine a group of Time Patrollers trapped in the Carthaginian timeline without access to a time machine. With a machine, they would be able to travel back to a time before the divergence, then travel forwards into their home timeline but, without a machine, they are stranded in the wrong timeline where they can only share a drink and talk about old times.