Strange Punctuation

"The Saturn Game," I.

After the first introductory Minamoto extract, we read a curiously punctuated dialogue that makes sense as we read on:

"'The City of Ice is now on my horizon,' Kendrick says. Its towers gleam white." (p. 2)

This first paragraph continues in this wise with Kendrick's words in inverted commas but the descriptions of him and his surroundings in italics. The words are spoken aloud by Colin Scobie who role-plays Kendrick as a small spacecraft transports him and his three companions from the solar sail ship, the Chronos, to the Saturnian moon, Iapetus.

The second paragraph begins:

"'Yes, I see the griffin,' Ricia tells him..." (ibid.)

Jean Broberg role plays Ricia, Kendrick's lover.

Third paragraph:

"'Hold there,' warns Alvarlan from his cave of arcana ten thousand leagues away." (ibid.)

Luis Garcilaso, sitting beside the others, role plays Alvarlan.

Kendrick - Sir Kendrick of the Isles - replies in the fourth paragraph, saying that he will:

"'...spy out city and castle.'" (ibid.)

Fifth paragraph:

"'I thought you were supposed to spy out Iapetus,' Mark Danzig.interrupted.

"His dry tone startled the three others into alertness." (ibid.)

 

The alert reader of Poul Anderson's text or of this blog will have gathered that Danzig does not role play, also that his three colleagues should not need to be alertened while approaching Iapetus. Their responses to Danzig's interruption indicate their characters: Broberg embarrassed; Scobie irritated; Garcilaso shrugging and grinning. But Garcilaso looks at his pilot console which surely he should have been doing in the first place. We have reached the top of page 3.

Update on other reading, remembering that Poul Anderson exists in a wider context. Solzhenitsyn's Lenin In Zurich went to the wrong Library so I haven't got it yet. I have been given an Annotated Ulysses so I might make some progress with that. Onward, Earthlings.