Synchronicity

The second of my podcast guest appearances about Avram Davidson went live last weekend – at the same time as a post appeared on Facebook about the very same story.

My appearance on Seth Davis’ Avram Davidson Universe site is live: Season 4, Episode 10 . We discuss a story from my favourite sequence by Avram – the Dr Eszterhazy stories. The particular story is Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard.

In Avram’s stories no detail, however obscure or seemingly irrelevant, is unecessary to the story. With his numerous degrees Eszterhazy understands that everything is connected, so one wonders if it was coincidence or synchronicity that Crossovers Expanded author Sean Lee Levin republished a Facebook memory from 8 years ago about that very story on the day the podcast went live. Sean included the story in his original two volumes of Crossovers Expanded to prove Eszterhazy existed in the crossovers universe (the third volume goes on sale soon from Meteor House – see https://meteorhousepress.com/category/forthcoming-titles/).

I had mentioned in the podcast the obvious fictional crossovers – Ruritania and Graustark being neighbours of Scythia – Pannonia- Transbalkania – and the mention of a student changing into a giant cockroach – but missed the Sherlock Holmes link Sean spotted. Which is another synchronicity as the latest volume of the MX Book ofNew Sherlock Holmes Stories – Part XLV – with a story by me, arrived in the post.

The story – Death at the Diogenes Club – is a sort of sequel to an earlier entry by me in the series – The Unlikely Assassin. David Marcum, who does an amaxing job editing the series, has placed a time scale of 1898 to 1917 on the storiesin this volume. This is around the same time as the Eszterhazy story is set. The link Sean missed is to Edward Bulwer Lytton’s Zanoni which features the aetheric life force of Vril mentioned by Smiht as the basis for his scientific experiments.