In any given passage of a third person fictional narrative, the omniscient narrator knows both the objective facts and the innermost thoughts and feelings of one of the characters, the viewpoint character. Of course, the narrative might be confined to those thoughts and feelings without any intrusion by objective facts.
This chapter begins by informing us that:
Avalon rotates in 11 hours, 22 minutes and 12 seconds;
its axis is tilted at 21 degrees;
Gray is at about 43 degrees North;
therefore, the city always has short nights;
Daniel Holm wonders whether that explains his weariness;
then he reflects that his ancestors arrived with Falkayn and have been Avalonians for centuries.
(We see one of those ancestors, Ivar Holm, in "Rescue on Avalon.")
Thus, the narrative moves from objective facts to subjective reflections.
The opening sentence about the Avalonian rotation period could have been a lead-in to a description of morning on different parts of the planet, on the Oronesian archipelago, in the city of Centauri on the Gulf of Centaurs, on the Plains of Long Reach, on the New Gaiilan savannah etc. However, I am not imaginative enough to write such a description.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Objectively speaking, Daniel Holm's weariness could be explained easily enough by overwork and frustration with both human and Ythrian obtuseness.
But mankind did evolve on a planet with a much longer rotation period. So I can see human colonists and their descendants still having problems adjusting to those short days and nights. One way of handling that would be the way the people of Unan Besar did: taking several sleeping periods during the short days and nights of that planet.
Ad astra! Sean
Oddly enough, the Terran Empire (despite Roman parallels) expands mainly -after- Manuel the First.
The Roman Empire expanded mainly under the last two centuries of the Republic; Augustus and his immediate successors more or less rounded off the territories and rationalized things.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That is true, albeit we do know Domitian conquered Dacia, north of the Danube River, and Trajan conquered Mesopotamia (tho his successor Hadrian abandoned it. And Marcus Aurelius was in the process of annexing what is now the Czech Republic after defeating the Marcomanni before he died.
Readers should keep in mind the Solar Commonwealth was not a large interstellar state. I don't think it ruled much more than the Solar System and a few of the nearer stellar systems before its collapse enabled Manuel Argos to replace it with the Empire.
Ad astra! Sean
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