Sunday 8 December 2019

Four Arms

"Lodestar."

Van Rijn:

"'What can we try and predict in advance? Forewarned is forearmed, they say, and the four arms I want right now is a knife, a blaster, a machine gun, and a rover missile, nothing fancy, maybe a megaton.'" (p. 395)

Verbal redundancy: all prediction is "in advance."

I thought that it was appropriate to conclude an evening of posting with a van Rijn pun.

If I remember right, John Carter carried four arms: long sword, short sword, dagger and pistol. And, of course, many of his antagonists were four-armed.

Tomorrow, I hope to drive Aileen and Yossi to Leighton Moss (scroll down) and to attend the meditation group. But I have not yet finished rereading "Lodestar." Coya Conyon appears only in this story and in its sequel, Mirkheim. But Anderson's texts seem to be inexhaustible.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Ha! I too appreciated Old Nick's pun: "forearmed" vis a vis "four armed"!

And we see four armed aliens in the Technic series: the Gorzuni!

Ad astra! Sean