Thursday 6 February 2020

Olga's Landing Old Quarter

A tame clopperhoof draws a wagon. Anyone making an authentic screen adaptation of Poul Anderson's The Game Of Empire would have to decide what a clopperhoof looks like. Human beings whose families have lived on Imhotep for generations are dark-skinned and aquiline-featured and should not look like dark-skinned Terrestrials. (There is a squat, black, planetary population in Larry Niven's Known Space - on Jinx?)

Like any good installment of a future history series, The Game Of Empire mixes old and new information. By this time, the series is so well-established and rich that there is much familiar information. There are references to:

Imperial offices
the Troubles
the Terran Empire
the inner Empire
the vaz-Siravo
a Merseian onslaught
Mother Terra
a regenerated arm
a centauroid Donarrian
Irumclagians
Shalmuans
Anglic
Toborko
Woden
Greater Terra
Adzel the Wayfarer
Tigeries
probably more but I must go out 

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul

A "clopperhoof" should be something like a draft horse, probably with bigger hooves than Terrestrial horses of approximately the same size. The trick, in any movie based on THE GAME OF EMPIRE, would be to make either a disguised horse look like an alien animal. Perhaps using CGI would be better?

I think Anderson wanted us to think of the Egyptians by the way he described Imhotepans.

Ad astra! Sean

paulshackley2017@gmail.com said...

Sean,
CGI is easy nowadays.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And would be necessary to use in films about Nicholas van Rijn and Dominic Flandry. Which I still daydream about!

Ad astra! Sean