-Poul Anderson, "The Moonrakers," see here, p. 148.
Nicholas van Rijn complains of industrial espionage by a competitor and even knows how much the man spent on spying the previous month. When asked how he knows this:
"Van Rijn managed to look smug and hurt at the same time."
-Poul Anderson, "The Master Key" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 275-327 AT p. 280.
Certain phrases become familiar when we reread Poul Anderson's works a few times but they never lose either their freshness or their force. Much of van Rijn's style and behavior is a sustained dramatic performance. See Nicholas van Rijn, Star Of Solar Spice and Nicholas Van Rijn, Actor And Spy.
This gives me an idea for a series of posts trawling back through the van Rijn stories but focusing solely on van Rijn himself:
appearance;
mannerisms;
malapropisms;
manipulativeness;
philosophy;
piety;
humor;
preferred surroundings;
etc.
However, it may be that much of this has already been covered. Van Rijn claims to find Anglic difficult to speak so what was his original language?
"The Master Key" was first published in Analog, July, 1964, which explains why the cover of that issue appeared on the previous post.
Self-adjusting furniture (see also here) appears yet again in "Moonraker":
"Dobshinsky was nervous. His own seat had trouble adjusting to his contours, the way he shifted about." (p. 138)
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The bit you quoted about Old Nick looking both "smug and hurt" made me laugh a bit!
If Anglic was not Nicholas van Rijn's birth tongue, I suspect it was either Dutch or the predominant language of Indonesia. I would lean to that being Dutch, because Old Nick was Catholic, not a Muslim.
Sean
Van Rijn's word patterns and the frequent references to the way he sounds suggest Dutch; so do his occasional oaths in Dutch.
He certainly also speaks Indonesian (which is a slightly modified form of Javanese, closely related to Malay -- mutually comprehensible with it, in fact).
My guess is that he's of mixed Dutch-Indonesian descent; there are substantial Catholic communities in Indonesia, of course.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Basically, that is what I was thinking: Old Nick being of Dutch/Indonesian descent. And I recall how he sometimes swore in Dutch. And I did think Javanese was very closely related to Malay.
I wondered if Nicholas van Rijn was either raised as a Catholic or was a convert. We don't really see much about his ORIGINS.
And centuries later, we see mention of "Polesotechnarch van Rijn" as a folk hero on the planet Unan Besar in THE PLAGUE OF MASTERS.
Sean
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indo_people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Dutch_Indos
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_people_of_Indonesian_descent
-kh
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