Chill In The Spirit

Fire Time, FOREWORD.

The two opening paragraphs are an extended pathetic fallacy. The first three sentences describe the impact of a man:

"It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of a wholly just man.

"His image had been chilling enough in court. Now we were summoned to himself." (p. 1)

The three remaining sentences follow this chilling man with appropriate natural phenomena -

First:

"Dusk took us as we stepped from the flyer..." (ibid.)

The flyer is a futuristic prop but also appropriate in this case because Fire Time follows The Star Fox in which Gunnar Heim had travelled in a flyer.

Secondly, a satellite passing out of sight:

"...vanished as if the thin cold wind that whittered about us had blown it out." (ibid.)

Of course the wind is cold when visiting a chilling man! (And the wind is everywhere in Poul Anderson's works.)

Thirdly:

"There streamed a smell of glaciers and distances." (ibid.)

Glaciers underline all the chill and cold. I have asked before when analysing an Anderson text: what do distances smell like? (See here.) In this case, the "glaciers and distances" suggest that this fearfully just man is both chilling and remote.

Lastly, for now, we notice that all the chill, cold and glaciers contrast with the title, Fire Time. We remember the beginning of another Anderson novel:

"Every planet in the story is cold - except Terra, though Flandry came home on a warm evening of northern summer. There the chill was in the spirit."

-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.

More chilliness.