-Poul Anderson, The Peregrine (New York, 1979), Chapter XX, pp. 183-184.
This sf action scene ends with such a striking simile that it made me seek out an image of an English autumn. Trevelyan descending the gravity shaft in a space boat in the Great Cross is compared to one of these leafs.
The October Country is an evocative title by Ray Bradbury.
The Peregrine ends:
"The sky darkened around them and the stars came forth." (op. cit., p. 184)
With just a slight rephrasing, this sentence could have ended with the word "stars," like the last chapter (not the Coda) of James Blish's They Shall Have Stars (Cities In Flight, Volume I) and all three Volumes of Dante's Comedy. (Plus see here.) Stars are important even if we cannot travel to them. Imagine if all that we saw in the sky was the sun, moon and planets.
As the sky darkens and the stars appear, we are either at or very near the end of the Psychotechnic History, depending on whether we include "The Chapter Ends" in that History. I am inclined to include it.
My next projects for the blog are to reread Virgin Planet and The Snows Of Ganymede but they will have to compete with a Montalbano novel. The opening sentence of The Snows... is apposite after a reference to Dante:
"Three dead men walked across the face of hell."
-Poul Anderson, The Snows Of Ganymede (New York, 1958), Chapter 1, p. 5.
However, this is hard sf: "...dead..." and "...hell..." are metaphors. Rereading of the future history continues.
2 comments:
By the way, the American use of "fall" for "autumn" is derived from a Midland dialect term that spread here via Pennsylvania. It apparently fell out of use in England.
Kaor, Paul!
Your mentioning of THE SNOWS OF GANYMEDE reminded of how I should have included that story alongside VIRGIN PLANET as one of my favorites among the Psychotechnic series. Despite being an early work of Anderson and thus, in some ways, a bit primitive, I like the ingenious plot twists and neat turns of phrase, like the one you quoted.
And the use of "...a dead leaf falling in England's October" reminded me of Flandry's melancholy reflections in WE CLAIM THESE STARS about the Terran nobles shivering and swearing a bit as they played with bright, fallen, autumnal leaves.
Sean
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