Cool air;
pine scent;
soft sounds;
muted energies;
lessened weight -
- after a nightmarish experience (see here) followed by unconsciousness, Kossara Vymezal wakes up in her bed in her cabin in the Hooligan.
Gentle music;
rose scent;
yielding firmness;
bodily peace;
sunlight -
- after a nightmarish experience followed by unconsciousness, Malcolm Lockridge wakes up on a couch in a maple-paneled room where moving colors form soft shapes on a screen while a garden with flowers, willows and a lily pond, a turf-green lane and a honeysuckle-covered house are visible through an open door. See The Time Wardens' Period.
This post compares a scene in the Technic History with a corresponding scene not in the Time Patrol series but in The Corridors Of Time.
4 comments:
It's an adventure trope. Harry Flashman occasionally goes into paragraphs of discussion of all the awakenings after horrible experiences he's had -- the safe ones, the ones where he realizes it's -not- over, and everything in between.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Very nice! I've thought and thought of how to comment about this blog piece, but I never realized "waking up" was an adventure trope. And I really should have, now that I'm thinking about it like that. We see "waking ups," for example, in Tolkien's THE HOBBIT and THE LORD OF THE RINGS.
Sean
I once recovered consciousness after being slugged and then (as I experienced it at the time) deliberately drowned; as I recall it (many moons ago), the mixture of physical pain and the realization that I wasn't dead were distinctly odd. The "not dead" part really did make the pain much less unpleasant.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Good heavens! I'm glad you survived this assault! I recall Flandy undergoing, I think, somewhat similar experiences.
Sean
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