"Odd, John thought..."
-SM Stirling. The Sea Peoples (New York, 2017), Chapter Ten, p. 162.
First, we notice the Andersonian convention of rendering a thought in italics without quotation marks. Secondly, we, or at least I, remember Odd John, a contemporary sf novel by Olaf Stapledon, linked to that author's future history. Does Stirling intend his readers to think of Odd John? Probably not. He would know of the Stapledon title and could have avoided the connotation by making John think Strange. But it does not follow from this that he intended any Stapledonian allusion.
How often does the meaning of a sentence depend on the position of a comma? When Patrick McGoohan's Prisoner asks "Who is Number One?" and is told, "You are Number Six," some viewers interpret this to mean: "You are, Number Six."
John is in what resembles the alternative history of The King In Yellow but is in fact an elaborate virtual reality (?) in the Otherworld. The Emberverse has changed its focus more than once - and I am coming down with a cold. There will be no more posts this evening.
2 comments:
Ah, you noticed!
And that trick of using italics for interior monologue has spread widely -- Harry Turtledove uses it too.
(In one of his stories, a character is a student of "Middle English science fiction" and writes an article tracing the use of "thutter" from Anderson to the next generation of writers, like Stirling...
Kaor, Paul!
I too was reminded of Olaf Stapledon's ODD JOHN when I saw "Odd, John thought." And I like how Anderson, Stirling, and other writers who follow their example use italics to indicate the interior, unspoken thoughts of their characters. This convention is clearer than using plain font and quotation marks. The latter is better used for spoken dialogue.
Sean
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