So Many Years Ago

See A Four Stage Literary Progression.

An author of a popular fictional series presses buttons by referring to earlier episodes. Characters and readers reminisce. (Alan Moore did this big time in his "last Superman story." See Life And Art II.)

When, in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows, I, Dominic Flandry is reminded of:

"...Persis d'Io as she had been when she and Flandry said farewell on a planet now destroyed..." (p. 344)

- this refers to Ensign Flandry, the first Flandry novel.

When we are told that Persis had never recontacted Flandry, not even when he:

"...well-nigh singlehanded put down the barbarians of Scotha and was knighted for it..." (p. 346)

-this refers to "Tiger By The Tail," the first published Flandry episode.

Let me conclude this post with two similar examples from Ian Fleming, then a peculiar one.

"'Remember that Moonraker job I was on a few years back?'"

-Ian Fleming, Thunderball (London, 1961), 17, p. 141.

Bond remembers:

"...the great battle across the baize he had had with Le Chiffre so many years ago."

-Ian Fleming, On Her Majesty's Secret Service (London, 1965), 2, p. 21.

A few years, so many years - but we are not told how many. Fictional time can be more fluid than real time. We can check the precise year of publication for each volume. In Royale-les-Eaux, Bond also visits the grave of "Vesper Lynd. RIP." (ibid.) Le Chiffre and Vesper are, respectively, the villain and heroine of the first James Bond novel, Casino Royale.

I have referred before to the haunting ending of Alice In Wonderland which refers to this work itself as a tale of long ago.

Established Characters

A series of novels set in successive decades of the twentieth century shows its readers several generations of one or more families - one exception being the novels of Dornford Yates, too appalled by modern decadence to allow his characters to procreate. Poul Anderson's Technic History presents four successive generations of Falkayns as well as some other family interactions. However, this series, a future history, covers not just decades but centuries and millennia. English becomes Anglic which becomes a dead language. Languages last longer than four generations of a single family!

Anderson earned the right to refer to his established characters when introducing a new edition of a novel. Sf readers understand when, introducing The Night Face, its author tells them that:

"...Nicholas van Rijn, David Falkayn, Christopher Holm, Dominic Flandry, and quite a few more characters lived in its past."

-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT INTRODUCTION, p. 543.

 

(David Falkayn marries van Rijn's granddaughter and Christopher Holm marries their descendant, Tabitha Falkayn.)

 

Well known fictional characters are referred to in later works of fiction, e.g., Sherlock Holmes in several works by Anderson. However, uniquely (I think), Lewis Carroll concludes Alice in Wonderland first by listing the White Rabbit etc as if they were already familiar characters, then by returning to "dull reality" and finally by referring to Wonderland itself as a "dream...of long-ago." Carroll looks forward to someone looking back...

 

We appreciate cross-reference and self-reference in works of fiction but Carroll, who was appreciated by Anderson, does something special.

Those Were The Days

"The Problem of Pain."

On his first job after graduating from the University of Nova Roma on Aeneas, Peter Berg explored the future Avalon with Ythrians who had not only scientific curiosity but also a sense of adventure. We have quoted his enthusiastic description twice before:

"'Oh, it was a wonderful thing to be young in that band!'"

-see here.

 

Berg is not yet thirty but it is possible to feel nostalgia for very recent times. In fact, I think that nostalgia is too precious a commodity to waste on the past. We can realize that we are now in times for which we will be nostalgic when they are gone. I managed to spin out my time in University and also to return to Higher Education twice later. Thus, while a student, I could remember being a student. In Dublin, someone said that he would read Ulysses in thirty years time when he was feeling nostalgic about Dublin. That was fifty years ago. Alice In Wonderland ends with Alice's older sister looking into the future to Alice looking back:

"...the dream of Wonderland of long ago..."

Understanding New Worlds

HG Wells' Time Traveller arrives in 802,701 and must deduce that Morlocks eat Eloi.

A Grand Survey team arrives on Ythri and must deduce that the Ythrians are winged but intelligent.

Nicholas van Rijn arrives on various planets and must deduce the motivations of the inhabitants so that he can do business with them.

Other Anderson characters do similar detective work on extrasolar planets. How many?

What is it like to return home from another planet or time? The Time Traveller eats only fruit in 802,701 so he craves meat when he returns to the nineteenth century whereas CS Lewis' Ransom eats only fruit in the unFallen Perelandra so he prefers fruit to bacon and eggs on his return.

And the Time Traveller makes a most powerful statement about the unreality of his experiences. When asked where he got the unfamiliar flowers:

"The Time Traveller put his hand to his head. He spoke like one who was trying to keep hold of an idea that eluded him. 'They were put into my pocket by Weena, when I travelled into Time.' He stared round the room. 'I'm damned if it isn't all going. This room and you and the atmosphere of every day is too much for my memory. Did I ever make a Time Machine, or a model of a Time Machine? Or is it all only a dream? They say life is a dream, a precious poor dream at times - but I can't stand another that won't fit. It's madness. And where did the dream come from? ...I must look at that machine. If there is one!'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1977), Chapter 16, p. 98.

Here he speaks for all of us and echoes Lewis Carroll: "Life, what is it but a dream?" He even comments that life is sometimes a poor dream. He has stepped right outside of the fiction. And he tries to remember the story as we do when we have not read it for a long time.

(Carroll ends Wonderland by imagining the future Alice remembering this same tale of long ago.)

The Time Machine And The Avatar

There is some unaccountable delay in my receiving a copy of Poul Anderson's The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, but meanwhile there are many other works to discuss.

"'Long ago I had a vague inkling of a machine -'
"'To travel through Time!' exclaimed the Very Young Man.
"'That shall travel indifferently in any direction of Space or Time, as the driver determines.'"
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 1, p. 11.

Despite this original conception, the Time Machine does not travel through space although Christopher Priest wrote a sequel called The Space Machine.

Other space-time vehicles include:

the Doctor's TARDIS;
the Time Patrol timecycles;
the T machines in Poul Anderson's The Avatar.

Thus, The Avatar elaborates a premise propounded in The Time Machine, not just time travel but space-time travel. I imagined the Time Traveler redesigning his Time Machine accordingly in "Time Travel Villains," here.

Notice the evocative phrase "Long ago...," which Lewis Carroll uses in his epilogue to Alice In Wonderland. It seems appropriate that a long time has elapsed between the inkling and the contraption. Wells was a long time writing The Time Machine before it reached its finished form.

This blog often returns to Wells who is foundational to Andersonian sf.