"He passed fully into this planet's long, long night." (IX, p. 129)
Have I remarked before on this casual, understated use of the highly significant phrase, "long night"? Have I even noticed it before?
Edgar Cayce belonged to a fundamentalist church where the only criterion in theological arguments was: "Well, as often as I've read the Bible, I've never thought that!" Perhaps we Anderson fans could adopt the phrase, "Well, as often as I've reread the Technic History or the Time Patrol, I've never noticed that!"
A Stone In Heaven is sharply divided between Ramnuan viewpoint and human viewpoint sections. At present, I feel like rereading only the latter so this will not take as long. My interest was in following up on Flandry after A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows. In that novel, Desai first expounded the theory of historical cycles to Flandry. By A Stone..., Flandry has studied, mastered and accepted this theory for himself. See here.
Only one fsf-relevant input today: hearing a radio dramatization of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, I realized that the novel is a fantasy about super-powered children, like Indian X-Men.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And WE CLAIM THESE STARS is rich in texts which can only be called Hordian! Albeit, most readers would realize that only after reading Anderson's summary of John Hord's theory in the former's article "Concerning Future Histories." But then Anderson was also drawing on the thought of Toynbee and Spengler.
Sean
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