Can there be intelligent beings that are at home in the elements like the Ythrians or the Alori (see also here)? If so, how will they perceive cities?
"Buildings loomed on either side, blotting out the stars, and there was iron, iron everywhere, the city was a cage of steel."
-Poul Anderson, "Interloper" IN Anderson, Fantasy (New York, 1981), pp. 178-210 AT p. 191.
"...He feels the presence of the city ahead of him. A numb deadened area in the green, a fugue in cement..."
-Alan Moore, Swamp Thing, Book 5 (New York, 2002), p. 28.
"The city is all about him, a defiant surge of stone and steel and glass that forces back the surrounding wilderness, jealously establishing its rigid gray territory."
-Moore, op. cit., p. 45.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
But the view point character in "Interloper," Beoric, felt that way about cities because his race, which had evolved on Earth alongside mankind, was ALLERGIC to iron and its products. And you will find iron everywhere in a human city. So people like Beoric would not be comfortable in our cities.
More often than not, we find more sympathetic descriptions of cities in Anderson's works.
Ad astra! Sean
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