Monday 26 March 2018

Waking Up

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:

S.M. Stirling said...

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.

Sean M. Brooks said...

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

S.M. Stirling said...

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.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Stirling,

Good heavens! I'm glad you survived this assault! I recall Flandy undergoing, I think, somewhat similar experiences.

Sean