Vicissitude and Season

Huh, that is interesting. I've never noticed any other authors talking about playing with time before. Sayers has some stuff about how the background stuff in one of her books (is it the foreword to Gaudy Night?) doesn't actually correspond to what was actually happening that year, but it's not about stretching or compressing time. I am greatly amused by O'Brian's audacious 'let's have lots of 1812s!' solution to the problem of wanting to have your hero everywhere at once. I wonder whether Flashman does that too; he seems the sort of character to whom time is an irrelevance, and he gets to every interesting historical event in his period.