Isolated farmers have deformed mutated children and argue about whether the world is ending, Biblically speaking. When the boss man accuses a woman of having killed a child:
"The woman shrank back, her lips tight. The room filled with a crackling silence through which Drummond could hear the jeering of the wind." (p. 24)
Yet again, the wind as Greek chorus.
The passage continues:
"One of the babies began to cry. It had two heads." (ibid.)
Before that, Anderson had told us only that about a quarter of the children "...were visibly monstrous." (p. 23)
Sometimes horror fiction works by letting the reader's imagination work. (Twilight World is not horror but, like any sf, can draw on that tradition.)
"Drummond rose. He felt a weight as of centuries on his shoulders..." (p. 25)
Earlier, he had thought of himself as "Heir of the ages..." (Prologue, 1, p. 5)
Time has weight, at least metaphorically. See here. A James Blish character has a similar experience:
"Weinbaum stared straight ahead. Suddenly, everyone and everything in the room was strange to him. He felt as though he had been enclosed in a glacier for 25,000 years."
-James Blish, The Quincunx Of Time (New York, 1983), p. 104.
Different fictional futures but comparable experiences.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Now that was an interesting insight, that some science fiction, like TWILIGHT WORLD, can draw on the literary tradition of horror. And we do see some elements of horror in this Anderson book. I've repeatedly read TWILIGHT WORLD, but I never thought before that it drew, or could be seen to have drawn on some of the traditions of literary horror.
Sean
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