A Change Of Pace

Following "The Problem of Pain" in The Earth Book Of Stormgate, "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson" is a change of pace, as Hloch indicates:

"Here is a story of no large import..."

-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), p. 49.

 

The opening sentence is light and good-humored in tone:

 

"Adzel talks a lot about blessings in disguise, but this disguise was impenetrable." (p. 51)

 

If we have read previous volumes of Anderson's Technic History, then we already know Adzel but here we see him from a different perspective as is appropriate in a future history series.

 

The narrator may be guilty of a logical error. If some events that do not resemble blessings are disguised blessings, it does not follow that all events that do not resemble blessings are disguised blessings. When I was at school, one pupil, wanting to insult another, said, "Peter, you know that saying, 'Familiarity breeds contempt'? I don't agree with it. No, no. I hardly know you and I can't stand the sight of you!" Of course, the quoted saying was that familiarity (is one thing that) breeds contempt, not that only familiarity breeds contempt.