-William Atheling, Jr., The Issue At Hand (Chicago, 1967), p.24.
"Like a bad stereodrama, the most ludicrous cliches... "
-"A Message in Secret," IV, p. 355.
However, Poul Anderson is not preempting objections to a bad story but presenting a good story, including a colorful detail about popular entertainment in Dominic Flandry's period. Phrases like "Like a bad film/stereodrama/etc" sound like inept attempts to forestall objections by implying that the bad stuff is not just bad but has been deliberately written that way for some kind of dramatic effect. Poul Anderson does deploy recognizable cliches of action-adventure fiction and sometimes even draws attention to them but always to good effect.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Flandry had been trying to convince a suspicious Oleg Khan that he was just a harmless dolt he could safely allow to leave Altai!
Ad astra! Sean
Also, history is far from minimalist or "realistic". Outrageous low-probability things happen all the time.
And life imitates art, and vice-versa. When they came over the mountain pass and saw the Valley of Mexico stretched out below them with its lakes and giant cities and palaces, its tapestries woven of hummingbird feathers and its shining pyramid-temples, according to a concemporary observer they all turned to each other and said:
"This is like something from 'Amadis of Gaul'!"
Which was a thud-and-blunder heroic fantasy romance popular with Spanish hidalgos at the time -- full of heroes, fights, beautiful princesses, and wicked sorcerers.
Cortez and his merry band then went on to conquer a great empire with cunning and Toledo steel, in a campaign you couldn't invent if you tried.
And an account of the death of Pizzaro at the hands of a band of disgruntled Spanish swordsmen waas taken and used almost word-for-word by Robert E. Howard for -his- fantasy stories.
As the saying goes, "you can't make this up!"
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, it sounds like fantasy, how a few hundred reckless Spanish adventurers, fanboys of the Medieval romances, overthrew the powerful Aztec and Inca empires!
And I don't care about modern, Politically Correct "histories," I'm sticking with William H. Prescott's classic histories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru!
And all this reminded me of Anderson's THE HIGH CRUSADE, in which, against all the odds, we see Baron Roger de Tourneville and a thousand or so Englishmen conquering the Wersgor Empire. And Baron Roger was as cunning as Hernando Cortes!
Ad astra! Sean
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