The planet Ramnu is entering an Ice Age:
"They felt how silence starkened the desolation, and welcomed a wind that sprang up near morning, though it bit them to the bone and made stands of spearcane rattle like skeletons." (p. 5)
The Ramnuans see environmental desolation, feel the cold and hear rattling vegetation: three senses. Wind biting to the bone and cane rattling like skeletons are reminders that, after their deaths in this deteriorating environment, the inhabitants themselves will become frozen skeletons. Not only that but the Pathetic Fallacy prefigures exactly what will happen to all but one member of this Ramnuan family group before the end of the opening chapter:
"The snowcliff stirred.
"A mighty wind rushed downward from it, smote like hammers, roared like thunder." (p. 100
- and Yewwl finds that the landslide, with its mighty wind, has not only destroyed the ancestral Shrine but also buried her husband and three children.
The chapter also includes a hovering flyer, like several in Anderson's works, but this one is of unknown species:
"A flyer hovered aloft, wings dark against a squat mass of clouds. Yewwl didn't recognize its kind. Strange things from beyond the Guardian Range were moving in with the freeze." (p. 5)
Of course the advancing Ice causes long range migrations.
No comments:
Post a Comment