Broderson's crew rescues the Emissary crew who have been detained in a space station by secret service men controlled not by the World Union government but by the anti-stellar cabal within it. Andersonian action: gunfire and deaths - we need delineate no details.
Broderson sees the Emissary's single Betan passenger:
"He saw the alien, chimerical cross between an otter, a lobster, a seal, a duck, a kangaroo, an alligator, a porpoise, no, none of those really, nothing he could name, nothing his vision was ready for, a brown blur -" (pp. 170-171)
We commented here on how Poul Anderson sometimes describes an alien by comparing it to a Terrestrial organism, then denying that comparison, while leaving the suggested similarity in his readers' minds, nevertheless. Surely he overdoes that approach in this case: a cross between an otter etc? "...brown blur..." would have sufficed for a first impression. And it would be a very rushed glimpse on a cinema screen.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And that was realistic of Anderson--I would expect a non-human species to so often differ from what our eyes/minds are familiar with that we need time to truly perceive them.
Ad astra! Sean
Yup. Most of the time, you don't actually 'see' things -- you see memories of them, routinely updated. If you're seeing something genuinely alien, it takes a while to sink in.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That has sometimes happened to me, needing to see something twice before really perceiving it.
Ad astra! Sean
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