(There is a contradiction, or an extreme conceptual dissonance, between the post title and the attached image but all will be made clear.)
Poul Anderson. Shield, XIII.
Gannoway (mentioned here) is:
"A tall, angular, somewhat Andrew Jackson-featured man..." (p. 99)
Does Anderson get our sympathy for Gannoway by making him resemble Andrew Jackson? This reminded me of something that leads to yet another comparison with Heinlein's Future History. Many years ago, James Blish gave me a copy, which I still have, of Alexei Panshin's Heinlein In Dimension as an example of how to write about an sf writer. Many years after that, I briefly met Alexei Panshin at an sf con. He wrote that:
Heinlein's characters are unemotional;
this may be why Heinlein tries to force emotion;
for example, when, in "If This Goes On -," an old man speaks against psychological reconditioning, he looks like Mark Twain and drops dead at the end of his speech!;
a writer should work harder than that to get an emotional response from his readers, i.e., we should care about the man not just because he looks like Mark Twain, then dies.
(I disagree with the old man about "free men." He says that they prefer to arrive at their own prejudices. I think that they prefer to find the truth.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Here you brought up a point about Heinlein I don't think I've thought of before: most of the characters in his book DO seem curiously lacking in emotion. And that was true even of his better, pre-STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND books. RAH's very real story telling abilities, in his best books, made most readers, I think, overlook that emotional flatness.
And that kind of flatness was even more true of Asimov's stories. To say nothing of Asimov's other flaws as a writer of fiction.
Poul Anderson was not like RAH or Asimov in being unable to depict emotions in his characters. IMO, he was able to do that very well. And S.M. Stirling as well!
Sean
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