Friday 25 January 2019

Multi-Species Narratives

Maybe After Doomsday is Poul Anderson's best multi-species sf novel? His The Broken Sword is a multi-species fantasy novel. See Supernatural Beings and Faerie Alliances. We compare elves and trolls with the alien Gorzuni in Weregild.

In sf films, TV series and graphic fiction, the physical appearance of the extraterrestrials is up-front/in-your-face from beginning to end whereas, in a novel, we read one description or maybe not even that.

Members of one Kandemirian subject race are like giant, glintingly scaled, quadruple-eyed, four-legged, tentacular-armed spiders, appearing in only one sentence. A Kandemirian is a seven-foot, broad-shouldered, thinly waisted, ovoid-headed, pointed eared, twelve-fingered humanoid with various facial dissimilarities to humanity. There are still two eyes above a nose above a mouth with ears at the sides. That is far too terrestroid, in my opinion.

The Forsi are described only as squat, leathery and flat-faced and that is it. We are told only that a graceful Eyzka is as beautiful as a hawk or a salmon had been. But what does he look like? Descriptions become more perfunctory as the alien species proliferate. Two companies filming After Doomsday could make the Eyzka look very different and both would be right.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Raxx, whom we see in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, is described looking very much like a spider. And Ydwyr the Seeker mentioned how his old nurse, also from a client race of the Roidhunate, was even more spidery looking.

Sean