The Chakora is fertile but the region around the Imperial capital, Katandara, is poor in wood so thick drapes serve for interior doors. The closest that Ikrananka has come to trees is "...long stalks, like plumed bamboo..." (I, p. 83) The exterior doors of the Ershoka barracks are iron.
A fountain is enclosed in a glass column to control evaporation.
A trader from Subsolar shivers.
Cosmology:
Fire and Ice interacted and condensed into the ordered universe;
there are no gods but demons try to restore chaos;
demons can be counteracted only by diverse magical practices;
some magicians are corrupted and serve Destruction.
Falkayn offers to sell four-leaved clovers and to teach a chance-controlling rite called poker. A reference to Martin Schuster's subversive introduction of the Kabbalah on Ivanhoe must, like the earlier reference to Beljagor, have been added when the stories were collected in order to pull the three stories together into a fictional biography of Falkayn.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteMeaning you think "The Trouble Twisters" was slightly revised by Anderson for the collection? That I had not thought of before. The question could be answered by comparing the original magazine published text with the version in the later collections.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
ReplyDeleteThe publication information page at the beginning of THE TROUBLE TWISTERS says:
"These stories originally appeared, in a somewhat different form in ANALOG..."
Paul.