Tuesday 22 March 2022

Dragon, Wyvern And Faun

"'No dragons are flying -'"
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 1.
 
"A wyvern flew up in a thunder of splendid wings."
-Poul Anderson, "The Faun" IN Anderson, The Queen Of Air And Darkness And Other Stories (London, 1977), pp. 86-90 AT p. 86.
 
What These Passages Have In Common
(i) Dragons, wyverns and fauns are mythological beings.
(ii) Each passage is the opening sentence of an sf story.
(iii) Each story is set on a humanly colonized extra-solar planet.
(iv) Each opening sentence implies fantasy, not sf.
(v) However, each story is in an sf collection.
 
Apart from all this, they are completely different.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I think most SF writers would have begun similar stories far more PROSAICALLY. Anderson preferred to use more colorfully metaphorical language. The opening paragraph of A CIRCUS OF HELLS is an example I thought of.

Ad astra! Sean