On Achilles

Thank everyone for their attention. This laptop has come back to life late in the afternoon/early evening and I am not sure whether I will be able to complete a full post. Because of the pandemic, I cannot take the laptop to a shop to be repaired or replaced but a repair service, contacted on my daughter's email (she lives elsewhere in town), might come to our front door some time.

Since I was not expecting a chance at blogging, what reading I have done so far today has not been of Poul Anderson. However, turning back to "Holmgang," I, we find that:

Johnny Malone from Luna City resembles certain more familiar Anderson characters in that he favors gaudy clothes, in Malone's case a brilliantly colored flowing tunic with a cocked beret;

Anderson's vocabulary remains rich as the men in the Last Chance bar watch an ecdysiast;

the recent introduction of the ion drive made it possible for a weighty guy like Bo Jonsson to get his spaceman's certificate.

As in Robert Heinlein's Future History, Anderson's text presents minute details of future daily life and we also read about how space technology changes and progresses during the characters' lives. It feels real.