"HB: What can you say about the first story, 'A Tale of Two Cities'?
"NG: It's right in the H.P. Lovecraft vein - I even use the word cyclopean near the end of it."
-Hy Bender, The Sandman Companion (London, 2000), 10, pp. 179-180.
"Above them vast, cyclopean walls loomed and towered..."
-Neil Gaiman, "A Tale of Two Cities" IN Gaiman, The Sandman: Worls' End (New York, 1994), pp. 27-41 AT p. 36, panel 1.
"When he stood on million-year-old snow, watching night creep up like smoke through crystal trees and cyclopean ruins, hearing Juchi chant under a huge green sunset sky, Flandry discovered that scientific explanations were but little of the truth."
-"A Message in Secret," IX, p. 375.
It is only a coincidence but also the kind that we usually do not notice unless we are reading texts very closely. For another Andersonian use of "cyclopean," see here.
Flandry realizing that scientific explanations are not the whole truth reminds us of Manse Everard telling Carl Farness that reality does not always conform to the textbooks.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And the great towers and other massive buildings of Admiralty Center will become cyclopaean ruins after the Empire falls.
And I recall the still cyclopaean ruins of the Imperial palaces on the Palatine Hill of Rome when I wandered among them.
Ad astra! Sean
I recall in "Orion Shall Rise", Kal Gar was a small city in the shadows of the cyclopean ruins of the earlier civilization.
Of course I can go outside & look at those buildings before they become cyclopean ruins.
Jim Baerg
Calgary Alberta Canada
Kaor, Jim!
And that's the best way to see great and massive structures--whole, intact, busily used with large numbers of people coming and going. As was the case with Admiralty Center in Chapter II of THE REBEL WORLDS.
Ad astra! Sean
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