Tuesday 25 April 2023

Five Cold Planets

"Every planet in the story is cold -"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT I, p. 342.

After an unheaded, italicized prologue, Chapter I begins as above. The planets in the story are:

Terra (we know it by now)
Diomedes (van Rijn was there)
Talwin (Flandry was there)
Dennitza (Kosarra, the new heroine, is from there)
Chereion (Aycharaych, the continuing villain, is from there)

The opening paragraph continues:

"- even Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit." (ibid.)

This continues the theme of evening and autumn on Terra which had been introduced and developed earlier in the Flandry sub-series of the Technic History. Our first sight of Terra in this novel is:

"Summer evening around Catalina deepened into night. Flandry sat on a terrace of the lodge which the island's owner, his friend the Mayor Palatine of Britain, had built on its heights and had lent to him." (I, p. 355)

Flandry has the opportunity to reflect while evening becomes night.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think we would both liked to know more about the Mayor Palatine of Britain. Flandry was choosy about his friends, so I'm assuming the Mayor was a fairly decent person. And was he a descendant of King Charles III?

Ad astra! Sean