Supernovae And The Periodic Table

"Lodestar."

There are two infodumps. The first, about supernovae, is in the flashback to Coya's search at Luna Astrocenter where she works with "...data banks and computers..." (p. 652) (Now we just say "computers.") The second, which interrupts and explains the continuing conversation between van Rijn and Coya, is about the periodic table. Of course, they are connected.

Supernovae

"The task [van Rijn] set her was sufficiently interesting to blot out her fears. However unimaginably violent, the suicides of giant suns by supernova bursts, which may outshine a hundred billion living stars, are not rare cosmic events." (p. 652)

 

In this passage, the first sentence explicitly expresses Coya's pov. It follows that it is she who thinks the second sentence about supernovae.

 

Further on:

 

"Supernovae, hurling atoms together in fusing fury, casting them forth into space as their own final gasps, have given us all the heavier elements, some of them vital, in our worlds and our bodies." (ibid.)

 

The narrator of this passage speaks as one of "us," Coya's contemporaries or successors. Again, it may be Coya herself although Hloch's Introduction to this story informs us that it was written by him and Arinnian who live centuries after Coya.

The Periodic Table

I am trying to identify an omniscient narrator of passages describing cosmic processes but maybe not finding one. The periodic table infodump begins:

"The primordial element, with which creation presumably began, is hydrogen-1, a single proton accompanied by a single electron." (pp. 655-656)

An omniscient narrator would know, not presume.

 

The next sentence:

 

"To this day, it comprises the overwhelming bulk of matter in the universe." (p. 656)

 

"To this day..." means that the narrator lives contemporaneously with his readers even though these readers are a fictional future audience, not Poul Anderson's twentieth-century reading public. The elusive omniscient narrator lives at no place or time.