"...the heights soared grey-blue to Mount Gundra, whose snowcap glowed red with perpetual sunset. The falls tumbled on his right, white and green and misted with rainbows, querning their way down to a Chakora which here was brilliant with fertility." (p. 173)
Whereas Terrestrials paint, photograph and remember their transient sunsets, Poul Anderson imagines a place with a permanent sunset. I used to imagine a world where Morning was not a time of day but a place with a half-risen red sun permanently on the eastern horizon and Night across a western sea. Although I had to resort to an alternative universe with a flat earth, Anderson imagines an extra-solar planet with one face turned to its sun. Ikrananka has a desert Dayside, a temperate Twilight Zone and a frozen Nightside but a circulating atmosphere and we accept Anderson's account.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteIt does make me wonder what happened on Ikrananka later in the Technic series. If, due to both trade with Solar Spice & Liquours and its share of the profits of Supermetal, was a modernized Ikrananka able to make greater use of the water frozen on the Nightside? That would seem a fairly obvious thing to do.
Ad astra! Sean