I have often commented on how well Poul Anderson controls narrative points of view (povs) and once here on how CS Lewis cleverly stretches the conventional rules about povs in his Ransom Trilogy. (He, Lewis, also unexpectedly comes on stage as first person narrator very near the end of the Trilogy Volume I.)
I cannot resist quoting the following beautiful sentence which incorporates two povs in a single sentence:
"Nothing was said for a long time as she counted the dead bodies and he thought about the extra cash he could pocket with her in retirement."
-John Grisham, The Whistler (London, 2017), 32, p. 304.
She was aware of her thoughts and he was aware of his but no third person was aware of both. Is our informant a third party who subsequently reconstructed what had happened, including what each of them must have been thinking at the time? Before the pivotal sentence, this passage is narrated from her pov, after that from his. Careful analysis of the text might uncover further subtleties. I do not think that Anderson ever switches povs in a single passage.
Tomorrow, sometime, back to The Stars Are Also Fire where, despite the prominence of conscious AIs, we are never given an AI's pov.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You are right, now that you mentioned it! I can't recall us being given the POV of any of the AIs we see in Anderson's works. Why was that, I wonder? Merely and oversight by PA or a deliberate choice? if the latter I can possibly see why he made that choice: the impossibility of TRULY giving us the POV of something as strange and alien to us as an AI.
Sean
Sean,
Anderson was always in control of what he wrote. There would have been no oversights.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Then this has to have been a deliberate choice by Anderson!
Sean
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