And the LORD said to Satan, “From where do you come?” Satan answered the
LORD and said, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking
back and forth on it.”
-Job 2:2.
"Once in his drifting to and fro across Earth, Jesse Nicol found a quivira left over from olden times."
-Poul Anderson, Harvest The Fire (New York, 1997), PROLOGUE, p. 9.
Venator:
"Trouble is loose, and again there is need for me to go to and fro in the world."
-ibid. CHAPTER 1, p. 33.
Anderson echoes Biblical language, affecting his readers subliminally.
Satan's toing and froing is inquisitive, even inquisatorial;
Nicol's seems to be aimless - "drifting";
Venator's will be purposive, so that he can return without delay to cybernetic Oneness.
Harvest The Fire is profusely illustrated with appropriate space scenes, making it a different kind of reading experience.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
just to compare with a different translation, this is how the Douai-Reims-Challoner renders Job 2.2: "...that the Lord said to Satan: Whence comest thou? And he answered and said: I have gone round about the earth, and walked through it." And, as you said, we often see Biblical echoes in Anderson's stories.
Jesse (another Biblical name!) Nicol's forlorn wandering around the world reminded me of the technician and carpenter/handyman who had both been made unemployable by technological advances in "Quixote and the Windmill." A similar fate was threatening Jesse.
Ad astra! Sean
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