Sunday 3 January 2021

Adventures And Troubled Times

See A Sense Of Adventure.

We enjoy reading both adventure fiction and narratives set in troubled times. Poul Anderson conveys the sense of living in troubled times in:

Mirkheim
The People Of The Wind
The Rebel Worlds
The Day Of Their Return
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows
The Game Of Empire
 
That list was longer than I had expected. In  A Stone In Heaven, there is a threat to the status quo, a planned coup, but it remains behind the scenes, suspected only by the central characters, so the general populace has no sense of "troubled times."

For a sense of adventure in works by Poul Anderson and SM Stirling, see the above link. Other examples in Anderson's works include the following opening sentence:

"Our part in the Grand Survey had taken us out beyond the great suns Alpha and Beta Crucis."
-Poul Anderson, "Wings of Victory" IN Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1979), pp. 3-22 AT p. 3.

This is pure Star Trek but much better. (See ...Better Than Star Trek.)

Also:

"We do not know where we are going..."
-see here.

"'You take the Long Trail with me!...'"
-see here.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think we also get a sense of troubled times in the opening to Chapter 1 of ENSIGN FLANDRY, in those ominous words "Evening on Terra." And I've esp. admired the opening paragraphs of A CIRCUS OF HELLS and WE CLAIM THESE STARS. Which I believe to also believe to give readers that "Here there be adventures" feeling.

I would like to have taken that Long Trail with Old Nick!

Ad astra! Sean