After 9:00 PM, I try to switch to non-blogging reading but often find connections. A reference to "a hint of spring" in Stieg Larsson's The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo reminded me that I had forgotten to post about a very appropriate Pathetic Fallacy in the concluding passage of Poul Anderson's last Dan Coffin story:
"...a rumble from the river, whose hardness had begun to break into floes under a first faint flowing of spring." (p. 157)
Anderson had described young people skating on the frozen Emperor River earlier in the story so that he would then be able to describe the sound of the ice beginning to melt at the very end of the story. Dan Coffin, great-grandfather and widower, has initiated a new spring for his planet, Rustum.
Another narrative detail was that the Rustumite citizens would watch the Constitutional Convention on television, then argue about it in taverns. The remote colony has become a new civilization.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Yet again, I can't help feeling some regret that Poul Anderson never wrote any more stories set on Rustum.
And Rustum needed that Constitutional Convention. The colony was becoming too large and populous to continue being governed by simply a Mayor and Town Council
Sean
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