"Adzel talks a lot about blessings in disguise, but this disguise was impenetrable. In fact, what Simon Snyder handed me was an exploding bomb.
"I was hard at study when my phone warbled. That alone jerked me out of my lounger. I'd set that instrument to pass calls from no more than a dozen people..."
-Poul Anderson, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" IN Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (Riverdale, NY, 2009), pp. 175-197 AT p. 177.
Key words: "me"; "I"; "my." We recognize a first person narrator. And he directly addresses his readers:
"You see, my preliminary tests for the Academy were coming up soon." (ibid.)
"She sat on on the tower of St. Barbara, kicking her heels from the parapet, and looked across immensity."
-Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 195.
We recognize a third person narration but there are two possible kinds of narrator:
the invisible omniscient narrator who knows the viewpoint character's innermost thoughts even if that character never divulges those thoughts to anyone else;
another person who has been told what happened or at least has been able to reconstruct it.
The narrator of The Game Of Empire, as of many other parts of Anderson's Technic History, is of the second kind:
"Consider Ensign Helen Kittredge. We pick her name at random out of personnel data. These say little more about her than that she was twenty Terran years of age..."
-op. cit., CHAPTER EIGHT, p. 276.
The paragraph goes on to summarize Ensign Kittredge's upbringing and training. This narrator is not omniscient. Speaking or writing in the first person plural, "We...," he must consult records and can only surmise as to exactly how the Ensign died. He - again expressing himself in the first person plural - would like to imagine that she was spared a painful death whereas the omniscient narrator would simply have described her death. The omniscient narrator would have been able to recount Ensign Kittredge's experiences until the moment of her death and then would have had to terminate that section of the narrative. See Heinlein, Anderson And Stirling On Death. For CS Lewis' literary stunts with points of view, see The Ransom Trilogy.
In Doctor No, Ian Fleming describes two characters' perceptions and thoughts until the moments of their deaths. This is the omniscient narrator speaking. But even the Omniscient should present only one point of view (pov) at a time. M, from his pov, rings Sir James Molony and, during the conversation, we are told what Sir James thinks of M. James Bond, from his pov, speaks to the Governor of Jamaica, then, in the same passage, we are told what the Governor says about Bond when Bond has left the room. Novelists have learned not to jump between povs like this and Poul Anderson rarely does so.
3 comments:
That opening scene from THE GAME OF EMPIRE is almost a direct steal from Kipling's KIM. Steal from the best!
Likewise, the last line of The Game... is practically word-for-word Kim.
Kipling: He crossed his hands on his lap and smiled, as a man may who has won salvation for himself and his beloved.
Anderson: He crossed his hands on his forelegs and smiled, as a being may who is winning salvation for himself and his beloved.
Dear Mr. Stirling and DAVID,
I agree! And I note both how Anderson worded that last sentence to make it appropriate for a non human and how he showed a downright CATHOLIC sense of caution by using "winning salvation" instead of Kipling's "won salvation."
Sean
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