In the opening paragraph:
rain is hot and heavy;
the sky is hidden;
air stinks of swamp;
a floodlight glares;
an engine mutters;
a bull brontosaur cries;
there is a sound of thunder.
I think that this means that the brontosaur's cry sounds like thunder, not that there is thunder.
In the second paragraph:
boots resound;
clothes sog with sweat;
rain goes down Herries' collar.
In the third and fourth paragraphs, a plesiosaur attacks Herries and its scream hurts his ears when it takes a bullet.
We do not yet know that this is time travel. In sf, dinosaurs can show up on other planets or in hidden valleys etc. Meanwhile, however, Anderson gets us straight into the action by assaulting three of the senses.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
An appropriately fierce beginning to a grim story!
Ad astra! Sean
Note that it's perfectly true that Earth has been much warmer than the present through most of the period since the atmosphere stabilized at roughly the current oxygen levels.
Usually there are no polar icecaps, no glaciers, and snow only on very high mountains in the winter of the temperate/polar areas.
The past 30-odd million years have been unusually and increasingly cold.
There have been more minor fluctuations more recently. The Roman climactic optimum was 1.5-2 degrees C warmer than the present, for instance.
During the Medieval warm period, what's now the fertile country of eastern Nebraska was a desert like the Sahara, with giant moving sand-dunes.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And it's facts like these which makes me so skeptical about most of the "solutions' being advocated for our current problems. I'll stay with the despised "technofixes" Zubrin proposes in THE CASE FOR SPACE.
Ad astra! Sean
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