Friday, 15 May 2020

Danger In The Air

Operation Chaos, IX.

Steve Matuchek attends the Homecoming game. This passage reminds me of scenes in Julian May's Galactic Milieu Trilogy: heavy traffic en route to a sports event.

During the interval:

"The hair rose stiff on my neck and I felt the blind instinctive tug of Skinturning. Barely in time I hauled myself back toward human and sat in a cold sweat. The air was rotten with danger. Couldn't anyone else smell it?" (p. 59)

"The room stank of demons."
-James Blish, Black Easter IN Blish, After Such Knowledge (London, 1991), pp. 319-425 AT p. 325.

"...the stench was something in the general air. It was, in fact, something that was abroad in the world...the secular world, God's world, the world at large." (ibid.)

Each Volume of After Such Knowledge begins with an assault on one of the senses. In the opening paragraphs of Doctor Mirabilis, Roger Bacon stands in a freezing stone corridor and, in the opening sentence of A Case Of Conscience:

"The stone door slammed."
-James Blish, A Case Of Conscience IN After Such Knowledge, pp. 523-730 AT BOOK ONE, I, p. 531.

But this has taken us away from Steve Matuchek to whom I must return shortly.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Your memtion of Julian May reminded me of how I'm finally nearing the end of her DIAMOND MASK. Her Galactic Milieu books are worth reading, but too many implausibilities for me to swallow without a hard struggle. Things like those mind powers and being able to travel FTL 5000 light years in only a few days.

Ad astra! Sean