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- and also follow the links.
I think that I have made a particular suggestion about "Honorable Enemies" before but now cannot find it. This short story lends itself to adaptation as an animated film. Four kinds of humanoids:
Terrans;
small blue Alfzarians;
large green Merseians;
one tall golden Chereionite (see image) -
- hunt large, winged "dragons." Each hunter flies a one-person air vehicle to which he is secured by a harness. Each flyer has a needle-beam energy weapon in its nose, which is described as minimal armament against this particular prey. Maybe the host of the hunting party, the Alfzarian Sartaz, would not be unhappy if some of his unwelcome and mutually hostile guests were to become casualties?
This reads like the premise for a cartoon film or a video/computer game.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Perhaps I'm being too finicky, but I'm not sure I like the idea of an animated film being made of one of Poul Anderson's stories. I've seen some and I never thought they looked quite "real" to me. And to attempt depicting non humans in such a medium is more likely than not to make them look even more implausible. The Merseians, for example, might end up looking like alligators in clothes!
Sean
Sean,
I think it can be agreed though that small blue humanoids, large green humanoids and a tall golden humanoid do sound like cartoon characters?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
They do, I agree. But I would EXPECT non humans to have different colors of skin from what is commonly seen among humans. I've never cared for the implausible looking aliens seen in most TV and filmed SF.
Sean
There are a very large number of planets with intelligent species in Poul's imaginarium. Given a roughly earthlike environment, that would sort of constrain evolution -- you could get some very strange forms (like the 3-way interspecies mind meld on Dido) but the most likely outcome would be a biped (starting with a quadrupedal ancestor) or a centuaroid (starting with a six-limbed one), and so forth.
And humans would be more likely to interact intensively with those species most behaviorally like them; commerce and politics would simply be more probable.
But while you'd expect a lot of species to be -roughly- similar to humans, with a different evolution you'd also expect a lot of differences of detail. Some would be very humanoid (Scothans), some less so (Meresians) and some not humanoid at all (Ikhranians or the winged Diomedians).
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Exactly! Given planets roughly similar to ours, or even very like Earth, I simply don't think it's unreasonable or surprising for an alien species to be humanoid, to have one head, two arms, two legs, etc. Because evolution would tend to favor species evolving like that. And, of course there would be a myriad of differences from human beings, both major and minor.
And I love that word, "Imaginarium"!
Sean
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