If we could see on different wavelengths, then we would see different colors - colors currently unimaginable to us?
After the eleventh jump, Chinook is enclosed by a vast luminous globe. The T machine, although within the globe, is dwarfed by distance. The globe comprises continually moving colors but I think that Anderson exaggerates when he tells us that:
"...every color that was which every seeing creature had ever known, swirled, mingled..." etc (p. 366)
The Chinook crew would neither see colors on different wavelengths nor know that they were there - unless this account describes what is seen not only by the crew members with unaided vision but also by the holothete Joelle whose instruments detect every kind of radiation and make her directly aware of them?
Yes. As the passage continues, it is narrated from Joelle's pov. She expects to meet and join the Others.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Different ways of seeing different colors? That leads me to point out that I would expect different intelligent races to have eyes perceiving colors in ways other species would not. We see Poul Anderson touching on this idea in Chapter II of WE CLAIM THESE STARS (1959), as Aycharaych and Flandry conversed in the garden of the Crystal Moon: "He [Aycharaych] looked at a violet burst of orchids and his long hawk-head inclined: "Black against the quicksilver water globe," he mused, "the universe black and cold beyond both. A beautiful arrangement, and with that touch of horror necessary to the highest art." However, this surprised the human: ' "Black?" Flandry glanced startled at the violet flowers. Then he clamped his lips.' But Aycharaych understood at once he had made a small mistake: ' "Touche. I should not have let slip that I am color blind in the blue wave lengths." ' It ended with Flandry inferring that Aycharaych could see further into the red wave lengths than humans could do, which the Chereionite agreed was the case.
Sean
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