San Francisco And Falkayn Bays

"Clouds were massing in the west, but it was still a clear night for early November. From the window where he stood, Michael Stefanik looked down, across the glitter of San Francisco and the darkness of the Bay, to those hills which enclosed the farther shore. They were strewn with firefly light, their own cities, against a windy sky."
-Poul Anderson, Perish By The Sword (New York, 1959), 1, p. 1.

These are the opening sentences of the novel.

For previous blog references to San Francisco Bay, see here.

"Nob Hill was more than a good address; it was seeing the great two-footed stride of the Bay Bridge, or the lovely curve men had thrown across the Golden Gate, or ships standing in past blue islands, whenever you wished."
-ibid.

For previous blog references to the Golden Gate, see here.

For comparable descriptions of Falkayn Bay on the colonized planet, Avalon, see here. (Scroll down.)

There is no direct connection between a contemporary detective novel and a futuristic sf novel. However, a real Bay on Earth and a fictional Bay on a terrestroid planet are comparable. Further, fictionally speaking, Avalon will be colonized in our future just as, fictitiously again, the events of the detective novel occurred in the 1950s. Thus, these two narratives could fit into a single timeline. In any case, we appreciate the descriptive passages set in such diverse periods and worlds of Poul Anderson's imagination.