Monday, 9 April 2018

The Plowman And The Parrot

"The stars burn bitterly clear."
-see The Battle Of Brandobar.

"The sky was utterly clear; men were indeed safe in this place. The constellations glittered in unfamiliar patterns. He could barely recognize the one they called The Plowman on Lochlann: its distortion made him feel cold and alone. The Nebula, dimming some parts of the sky and blotting out others, was somehow less alien."
-Poul Anderson, The Night Face IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 541-660 AT V, p. 594.

No Milky Way here. From Avalon, Sol is in the Maukh (see here).

"I had a notion that if I stayed here long enough to become light-adapted, I might even be able to make out a few of the simpler and more banal constellations. From here, for instance, you  ought to be able to make out Orion, and begin to catch distorted hints of the constellation the Sun belongs to from far away, called the Parrot. Only a computer can analyze our constellations in space; the eye can see nothing but the always visible stars, clouds and clouds of them, glaring and motionless..."
-James Blish, "And Some Were Savages" IN Blish, Anywhen (New York, 1970), pp. 75-103 AT p. 87.

Clouds of stars are an Andersonian image in a James Blish story.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Yes, but my view is Anderson uses such images and metaphors about the stars more strikingly and succinctly than does Blish and many other SF writers.

Sean