Fictions

Arthur Conan Doyle and his readers are real whereas Sherlock Holmes is fictional. Usually, fictional characters are also fictional to each other. Thus, Holmes refers to Dupin, Poirot might refer to Holmes etc. I did read a detective fiction anthology where several of the characters referred to each other almost in rota. There would be a conceptual problem if two contemporaneous characters each referred to the other in this vein. The novelistic Montalbano does refer disparagingly to the fact that he is dramatized on TV. There are three ways in which fictional characters might be real to each other and Poul Anderson presents two of them.

(i) A one-off reference. Close readers of Anderson's Time Patrol series realize that the timeline guarded by the Patrol is not ours because, in it, Holmes is real - although his name is not used except in contexts where he could be fictional. (If this is confusing, read it and see.)

(ii) A shared universe:

the Wold Newton universe;
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen;
various comic book universes, now being adapted to screen.

(iii) A multiverse where what is fictional in one universe is real in another and vice versa:

Last Action Hero (and here);
the DC Comics multiverse;
Anderson's Old Phoenix multiverse.

Holmes shows up in the Old Phoenix along with Huck Finn and others.

This leads to another issue. There are kinds of multiverses. Parallel universes might have:

different histories;
different laws of nature;
inhabitants who are real in one but fictional in another.

SM Stirling's multiverse(s?) are of only the first kind. In the Emberverse, some laws of nature begin to work differently on Earth after a certain date but (we think that) this is because a higher technology has tampered with them so this is another alternative history but not a different kind of universe.

Three Miscellaneous Points

(i) Nat Falkayn growing up among Ythrians on Avalon is another example of a juvenile character living inside an adventure story. See here. He must be the forerunner of the many human Avalonians who later join choths.

(ii) An Englishman is correct about English grammar:

"...I hadn't quite decided whom to ask." (Chapter Twenty, p. 549)

(iii) The 622-page A Meeting At Corvallis (Emberverse, Vol III) has arrived so discussion of this series will continue. Meanwhile, there will continue to be unpredictable revisits of Poul Anderson's works. We have a universe to win.

"Hunting Through Hills..."

Many horrible things happen in fiction but sometimes the characters get to do exactly what they want. Diana Crowfeather runs away from home because:

"...Tigeries were hunting through hills where wind soughed in waves across forests, and surf burst under three moons upon virgin islands."
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire, Chapter One, IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), pp. 195-215 AT p. 214.

And, in another timeline:

"'What the Dunedain need is a base...We could claim this whole area...'"
-SM Stirling, The Protector's War (New York, 2006), Chapter Twenty, p. 548.

They will hunt and trade instead of farming. Yes!

Time Patrol Blurb II

See here.

If there is an observer, like maybe a "god of time," for whom:

our temporal dimension is his fourth spatial dimension;
the relationship between successive timelines is his temporal dimension -

- then, from his perspective though not from ours, our timeline has vanished.

The blurb concludes by stating that the past must not be altered in case this leads to a worse future. But, even if it led to a better future, the Danellians would still guard the timeline that leads to them. However, it transpires that ultimately the Patrol prevents a worse, chaotic, timeline in which life would be impossible.

Time Patrol Blurb

"The discovery of time travel means that everything we know, anything we know, might not only vanish, but never even have existed."
Poul Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), back cover (not written by Anderson).

There are different models of time travel but, on the Time Patrol model, this can happen:

I am born in 1949 in our familiar timeline;
in 2017, I acquire a time machine;
I travel into the early nineteenth century to prevent the birth of Hitler - no easy task but, on this model, it is theoretically possible;
I succeed.

Whatever their ontological status, we can now differentiate between two timelines:

the original, in which "everything we know" exists;
the altered timeline, in which everything we know has never existed.

There is no third timeline in which everything we know did exist but has now vanished. There is another issue but let me get some breakfast first.

Guardians Of Time And Time Patrol

When I first read Poul Anderson's Time Patrol series in the early 1960s, it was four stories in one collection, Guardians Of Time, and the collective villain was the Neldorians.  

Time Patrol (New York, 2006):

collects ten stories, including the original four;

includes, among its six newer stories, two that are over 100 pages long,  therefore counting as novels by my rule of thumb;

is the first of two Time Patrol volumes;

informs us on its back cover blurb that the collective villain is the Exaltationists - who, unlike the Neldorians, are continuing villains.

The second volume, The Shield Of Time, concludes the story of the Exaltationists but also reveals that there is a greater threat beyond them and that that greater threat is the real reason for the Patrol. Guardians Of Time and the Neldorians have been incorporated into the longer series but have also been left a long way behind - like the Torah incorporated into the Bible but also left way behind by the time the reader reaches the Apocalpyse.

We might discuss the Time Patrol blurb but not tonight.

Harvest Supper

SM Stirling, The Protector's War (New York, 2006), Chapter Nineteen, p.528.

Another harvest supper (see here):

hot biscuits
warm round loaves marked with the Wheel of the Year
butter
cheese
green salad
glazed hams
cold roast beef
fried chicken
apple-cured bacon
wild mushrooms
steamed vegetables
baked beans
pork
steaming new potatoes
baby beets
strong homemade mustard
creamy horseradish
peaches, berries and cherries with cream
honey
cold water
milk
home brew
cider
wine
herbal tea

Children Of League And Empire

Nat Falkayn is David Falkayn's grandson and Nicholas van Rijn's great-great-grandson.
Nat's father is Nicholas Falkayn.
Since David's mother, Athena, appears in Mirkheim, we know four successive generations of Falkayns.
Tabitha Falkayn is their later descendant.

The four works set during the Molitor dynasty feature:

two sons and one granddaughter of Hans Molitor;
a son of Dominic Flandry and Persis D'Io;
a daughter of Flandry;
a daughter of Max Abrams;
a son of Dragoika -

- and also mention a grandson of Molitor, Crown Prince Karl.

I think that it makes sense for these four works to be collected under the title of Children Of The Terran Empire. Poul Anderson's Technic History is not presented as a family saga and indeed its main focus is not family histories but historical processes. See here and here. Nevertheless, certain families make major contributions to more than one volume.

Grim Goddess

Poul Anderson shows ancient Paganism in its period and also presents fantasies in which the Gods are real. He makes at least one disparaging comment on modern neopaganism. After we have been told that the slaves who wash the idol of a goddess are then drowned:

"'A pretty grim sort,' Everard said. The neopagans of his home milieu did not include her in their fairy tales of a prehistoric matriarchy when everybody was nice."
-Poul Anderson, "Star of the Sea" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 467-640 AT p. 565.

Sir Nigel Loring reflects:

"He'd known Witches before...two dozen had hidden out in the New Forest..."
-SM Stirling, The Protector's War (New York, 2006), Chapter Eighteen, p. 507.

I think that Stirling is ironically referencing Gerald Gardner's claimed initiation:

According to Gardner's later account, one night in September 1939 they took him to a large house owned by "Old Dorothy" Clutterbuck, a wealthy local woman, where he was made to strip naked and taken through an initiation ceremony. Halfway through the ceremony, he heard the word "Wica", and he recognised it as an Old English word for "witch". He was already acquainted with Margaret Murray's theory of the Witch-cult, and that "I then knew then that which I had thought burnt out hundreds of years ago still survived."^[96] This group, he claimed, were the New Forest coven, and he believed them to be one of the few surviving covens of the ancient, pre-Christian Witch-Cult religion. Subsequent research by the likes of Hutton and Heselton has shown that in fact the New Forest coven was probably only formed in the mid-1930s, based upon such sources as folk magic and the theories of Margaret Murray.[97
-copied from here.

(I met Philip Heselton when he visited Lancaster to address the Briganti Moot.)

What Will People Wear In The Future?

Nicholas van Rijn lounges in a sarong.

Ythrians are unclothed because feathered. Some human choth members, emulating Ythrians, wear only body paint.

Dominic Flandry dresses as colorfully and flamboyantly as possible but not in anything unexpected like a kilt or toga.

Robert Heinlein, aware that social norms differ historically, has shorts on men in Double Star and kilts in parts of the Future History.

In SM Stirling's The Protector's War (New York, 2006), Chapter Eighteen, a hostage wears:

"...a plain gray guest-weave rather than the Mackenzie tartan..." (pp. 514-515)

I was told that a book describing clan tartans has been taken as normative. See here. Apparently, one of the Kings had a tartan designed for him but anyone can wear it. Scottish people of Italian descent have a tartan. See here.