"...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.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
It 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
Post a Comment