Ben-Hur, Martin Padway And The Time Patrol

To Turn The Tide.

All literature is a conversation with earlier literature, sometimes explicitly:

"Everyone on a Roman naval ship was a free man and part of the military and would fight at need - Ben-Hur had gotten that drastically wrong. 

"Pity. Both movies were great otherwise, though the 2016 one was better..."

-CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, p. 310.

(I have found an on-line list of five Ben Hur films.)

"That was another gift of Martin Padway. Though for some reason he hadn't known the actual formula for gunpowder, odd in an archaeologist, even a fictional one.

"Or maybe not, that book was written a century ago...well, nearly, 1938. Damn, but the English language is not intended for time travel, and Latin's even worse."

-CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT, p. 399.

And that concluding sentence might be an indirect reference to the Temporal language of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol. (Although, unfortunately, we do not read a single word of Temporal.)

Four words of Latin in another Anderson time travel work:

"'Es tu peregrinator temporis?'"

-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), VI, p. 62.

Gaining Warskills

"The Game of Glory," I.

An ambushed Nyanzan marine dies on Brae:

"'Ai! 'List nay, they said. Nay let recruiters 'list you...damned Empire...even to gain warskills, don't 'list...shall freedom come from the slave-masters, asked he in Uhunhu. He and his 'ull teach what we must know, see you?'" (p. 305)

Issues encapsulated here:

I remember Ben Hur saying that he would fight for Rome if Rome taught him how to fight against her;

the Nyanzans are not enslaved but there are slaves in the Terran Empire;

"...he in Uhunhu..." is an agent of Merseia so his claimed opposition to "slave-masters" is cynical and manipulative;

however, every opponent of slavery is not a dupe of a foreign power. ("We serve neither King nor Kaiser but Ireland.")

Swords (Or "S&SX3")

Fantasy includes "Sword and Sorcery," e.g., Conan.

Sf includes "Sword and Science," e.g., John Carter.

Historical fiction includes "sword and sandals," e.g., Ben Hur.

Poul Anderson wrote:

Conan The Rebel (see above);

The Broken Sword (fantasy);

other fantasy novels;

 
The Golden Slave (historical);

 
Rogue Sword (historical);

"Son of the Sword" (prehistorical);

The High Crusade (historical sf) -

- and Flandry fences twice (sf).

Thus, Andersonian comprehensiveness.

SM Stirling's Emberverse:
loss of science;
return to "sword and sandals";
also, return of sorcery.

These reflections were prompted by reading an account of a slave galley in Stirling's Prince Of Outcasts.