ridiculously fat;
has to squeeze into a chair;
short legs and flat face show swampman ancestry (Sumu rules Swamp Town);
middle aged and balding;
dyed hair and beard;
gold stars painted on fingernails and gems on fingers;
embroidered, furred tunic;
blows blue smoke from a cigar;
curries favor with the Imperial Captain General who "...no more despised a merchant for being a merchant than a dog for being a dog." (The Winter Of The World, V, p. 42)
5 comments:
Paul:
Alan Dean Foster, in The Tar-Aiym Krang, his first published novel (1972), created Maxim Malaika.
"Malaika was not as tall as Tse-Mallory, but he was at least twice as broad and had the build of an overage wrestler. Shockingly white teeth gleamed in the dusky face which bore the stamp of the kings of ancient Monomotapa and Zimbabew. Massive, hairy arms protruded from the sleeves of the one-piece semisilk dressing gown...." Chunky more than actually fat, but still.
It's mentioned that Malaika's left leg is partly prosthetic, because in an emergency, caught without weapons, he protected a young woman from a predatory lizard by jamming the one he was born with down the carnivore's throat. The fangs did a bit too much damage to be fully repaired, so the leg from the knee down had to be replaced. A good man to have on your side in a tight situation.
He doesn't use malapropisms like van Rijn ... but he peppers his "symbospeech" with enough words from other languages to produce a somewhat similar effect. "Choovy! And other unmentionables! Damn!"
I'm inclined, thus, to think Foster meant Malaika as something of a homage to Old Nick.
Re the title: The Krang was a device built by the Tar-Aiym, a conqueror race millennia dead at the time of the story. And as one of the book's blurbs said, "Nobody knew what the Krang might be, but everyone wanted it. Until it was found...
"Then it turned out that the Krang had a purpose, and that the Krang had power and a will of its own..."
David,
"Krang!" sounds like a swear word.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Amusing, this Intercosmic League of Fat Merchants you created! I might have included the obese Leon Ammon, seen in A CIRCUS OF HELLS. True, he was a gang boss, not a legitimate merchant. But his longings to become "big" included going legitimate, by setting up a mining company to again mine the rare or valuable metals of Wayland.
Sean
Sean,
Ammon will have to work a bit harder to satisfy our criteria.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Oh, I agree! Poul Anderson created not only striking primary characters, but also equally interesting secondary ones like Sumu the Fat and Leon Ammon. It would have been interesting to know what became of both of them in later years.
Sean
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