See The Game Of Empire: Some Loose Ends.
Not many left but here is one. To Targovi, Tigeries smell sweet, human beings sour and Merseians bitter. (CHAPTER NINETEEN, p. 411) There are species for whom scent is as significant a sense as sight so what would it be like if one of those species were intelligent?
The concluding page of the novel gives us what I call Flandry's Testament, which ends with a question:
"'...what the score will be when all the pieces go back in the box, who knows?'"
-CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE, p. 453.
Flandry has spent his adult life fending off the Long Night. Turning to the opening sentences of the following installment to be collected in Flandry's Legacy, we read:
"Later ages wove a myth about Roan Tom. He became their archetype of those star rovers who fared forth while the Long Night prevailed."
-Poul Anderson, "A Tragedy of Errors" IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 455-540 at p. 457.
We are abruptly aware that we have finished reading the biography of Dominic Flandry and that instead we are now being informed about a later period of this future history. The Long Night has come at last and a different kind of hero lives within it.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
So legends were "woven" around Roan Tom? And probably epic poems as well. Which me think of BEOWULF, another poem probably composed not too long after Rome fell. I recall Anderson having "Bjovulf" active in HROLF KRAKI'S SAGA, which was set in the early to mid AD 500's. Beowulf could be thought of as analogous to Roan Tom.
Ad astra! Sea
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