The Queen of Air and Darkness warns her subjects:
"'If you stole a babe from the camp full of engines...then they were folk out of the far south who may not endure it as meekly as yeomen.'" (p. 164)
Technologically powerful human beings will not meekly accept fairies, or fairy-like beings, stealing their children? Very true. So is the scene set for a battle between science and the supernatural as in James Blish's The Day After Judgment where the Strategic Air Command attacks the demon fortress of Dis now raised to the Earth's surface in Death Valley, "...even as it was in the beginning, in the Valley of Death"?
Well no, because the supernatural in the Anderson story is faked by alien telepathy. But we do not know that yet. Try to reread a text as if you had never read it before. Check whether the author appropriately and adequately introduces and explains everything that needs to be introduced and explained. There is a lot going on in "The Queen of Air and Darkness."
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What Poul Anderson did at the beginning of "The Queen of Air and Darkness" was to skillfully and convincingly evoke a "supernatural" atmosphere. And what the story eventually shows us was the CLASHING of two different kinds of science on Roland.
Btw, those Carolingian names we see, a sun named Charlemagne, the planet Roland, and moons like Oliver and Alde, makes me think the human explorers who first came to the Charlemagne system included fans of the Carolingian poems and legends, like THE SONG OF ROLAND.
Sean
Sean,
You are developing a branch of Andersonian scholarship: making deductions about extra-solar colonists from the names that they bestow on heavenly bodies and geographical features.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I kinda like that idea, many thanks! But it seems obvious enough, to make some reasonable deductions about the people who explored or settled a planet from the names for those solar or planetary bodies. Hermes, for example, in the Technic Series, was probably named by people familiar with the Greco/Roman classics. Which also implies they were of Western and European/American origin.
I have speculated that Unan Besar was settled by people from the island of Java or Bali because Islam seems to be still fairly thinly "rooted" there. So I can imagine some people who originally came from Indonesia were able to shake off a religion they did not really like and revert to Hinduism. At least that's how I would try to make sense of why the people of Unan Besar (in THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS) were not Muslims.
Sean
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