Friday, 31 May 2019

Separate Ecologies And POVs

"Rescue on Avalon."

In Three Stages, I mentioned division of territories and mixed menus on Avalon. Here is more relevant information:

"While men and Ythrians could eat many of the same things, each diet lacked certain essentials of the other. For that matter, native Avalonian life did not hold adequate nutrition for either colonizing race. The need to maintain separate ecologies was a major reason why they tended to live apart." (pp. 318-319)

From the tower of Weathermaker Choth, Nat Falkayn saw native susin beyond the area cultivated with Terrestrial grass and Ythrian starbell. See Environmental Details.

When Jack seeks the injured Ayan, he is guided by the latter's occasional hunting calls. At the beginning of this passage, we are told that:

"...Ayan had shut his mind to pain while he waited for rescue or death." (p. 316)

This reads like Ayan's pov. However, when Jack arrives:

"Far down a steep slope, the Ythrian sprawled..." (p. 316)

This is Jack's pov. Ayan's pov would have been about seeing a young man arrive at the top of the slope. That the narrative has remained with Jack's pov is confirmed when we are told that Jack knew that it was idiotic but asked Ayan how he was, addressing him as "'...sir...'" (p. 317)

The narrator recounts Jack's experience in the third person but also has some information about Ayan's condition before Jack's arrival. Hloch tells us that this story was written by A. A. Craig in his Tales of the Great Frontier, as was "Margin of Profit," introducing van Rijn.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And "A.A. Craig" was something of an inside joke by Poul Anderson! It was a pseudonym he sometimes used. Another being "Michael Karageorge." And yet another was "Winston P. Sanders." Sometimes that was because issues of a magazine might contain more than one story by the same author and it was thought better for one of them to have a pseudonym.

Sean