The captured spaceship carries twice as many men as women and is bound to a place where the "blueskin" (Wersgorix) females are expected to be as unsightly as the males that were encountered and defeated. However:
"'How do you know they don't hold beautiful princesses in captivity that yearn for an honest English face?'
"'That's so, my lord. It could well be.'" (p. 32)
Beautiful princesses! It could well be! If this were a novel by ERB, then it would well be! Any ERBian planet bears both a race of recognizable aliens and also a human race with a beautiful princess for the hero to marry.
The High Crusade is not that kind of pastiche. If it were, then Anderson would either accept human Martians etc as one of the premises or ingeniously rationalize the existence of such a race. For example, in Michael Moorcock's Martian Trilogy, the hero time travels to Mars at a time before the human race had migrated from there to here - and there is also a blue (not green) race that did not come to Earth.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And there's also Stirling's IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS, the second of his two Lords of Creation books. Powerful aliens in the very remote past had terraformed Mars and transplanted hominids from Earth to Mars. And we do see beautiful princesses in that book!
IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS is both rigorously thought out hard science fiction and deeply and affectionately influenced by ERB's Barsoom stories.
Sean
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