"'...are the potential property of other races...'"
-James Blish, The Seedling Stars (London, 1972), Book Four, p. 190.
Here they agree with Poul Anderson's Terran Empire which sells Jupiter to the Ymirites.
(James Blish coined the term "gas giant" for a type of planet.)
I mention this because, both in "The Star Beast" by Poul Anderson and in The Council Of Shadows by SM Stirling, a man in the form of a tiger has to remember why he should not eat the woman in front of him. In Stirling's novel, we are confident that the hero will not eat the heroine. However, "The Star Beast" ends on a note of uncertainty:
"Time stretched into a horrible eternity while they stood facing each other - the lady and the tiger."
-Poul Anderson, "The Star Beast" IN Anderson, Strangers From Earth (London, 1965), pp. 112-148 at p. 148.
I suspect that such ambiguity was rare in the space operatic Super Science Stories.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And it made sense for the Terran Empire to sell or swap gas giant planets like Jupiter to the Dispersal of Ymir in exchange for terrestroid planets. They both gained planets of the kind their species required.
It was precisely because Anderson showed such ambiguities in stories like "The Star Beast" which made him MORE than a writer of action/adventure. And I liked how Stirling showed how Adrian Breze deliberately reminded himself, while in the form of a saber toothed tiger, to keep in mind his HUMAN goals.
Sean
Paul and Sean:
One of the viewpoint characters in Andre Norton's Moon of Three Rings gets his mind transferred into the body of a predatory beast. There's a scene of him encountering three men against whom his human self has reason for a grudge, but the beast has at this point taken charge of his mind to the point that it thinks:
"Krip Vorlund—who was Krip Vorlund—what call had he on Jorth the barsk for vengeance? It did not matter. These were my kill—
"So much did I consider them my prey that I came into the open without any more use of cunning, and gave a war cry in the deep-chested growl of my kind...."
A bit earlier — the very first time he killed a man with his fangs — Vorlund had worried that the beast might take over in just such a way.
Kaor, DAVID!
I have read some Andre Norton, but I don't recall MOON OF THREE RINGS. Yes, Norton was right, a human personality in a beast's form is all too likely to have human goals and ends swamped by those of the merely animal form he inhabited.
Sean
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