Meanwhile...

Building on three previous volumes, Poul Anderson's The Fleet Of Stars is a rich sf novel. By p. 221, we have seen:

one of three new extrasolar colonies;

the system of Alpha Centauri, now filled with flying rubble from a planetary collision but still inhabited by the asteroid-dwelling Lunarians;

interactions between Terrans and metamorphs in the Inner Solar System where Earth and Moon are free from poverty and wars and there is a plan to terraform Mars;

the vast domain of the Lunarians among the planetoids and comets of the Kuiper Belt and the Oort Cloud;

the build-up to a confrontation between the free human beings in space and the artificial intelligence controlling the utopia-but-with-remaining-alienation-and-discontent on Earth and Luna.

Meanwhile over on www.comicsappreciation.blogspot.co.uk, I have posted about Garth Ennis' The Boys and have been sidetracked into rereading that series. While reading well-drawn graphic fiction, we simultaneously follow a narrative with characterisation and appreciate visual art.

Anderson's descriptive passages always appeal to several of the senses while presenting colourful, vivid accounts of natural or exotic scenes. The latter include for example Lunarian habitats where energy and space are devoted not only to survival but also to comfort and ostentation. Readers with good visual imaginations should be able to visualise what is described and to project how it could be filmed. However, since my thoughts processes are entirely abstract, "auditory digital" in Neuro-Linquistic Programming terminology, I remain very conscious of a qualitative difference between the verbal fiction of a novel and the visual-verbal fiction of a graphic novel.