Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), p. 454 -
- and wondering what had happened in the centuries between Dominic Flandry's visit to Imhotep in the Patrician System in the concluding chapter of The Game Of Empire and Roan Tom's flight from Sassania at the beginning of "A Tragedy of Errors."
In "A Tragedy of Errors," as in Anderson's "Eutopia," when the central character arrives in a new world, the locals start gunning for him and he has to go on the run but, in both cases, there is a reason. This is not just Andersonian thud and blunder.
Poul Anderson shows us not only planetary surfaces but also interstellar space as an environment. EVA, Tom sees:
the nearby star of two Solar luminosities, coloured like a gold and copper alloy;
Capella - with Old Earth somewhere beyond it;
the thundercloud-like Nebula;
the planet that he is orbiting, with many seas but no ocean, tinted green, blue, brown and red;
one of the planet's two small moons.
Anderson could just have written that Tom was orbiting a planet but he gives us a lot more than that.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Assuming the Empire survived as long as three centuries after THE GAME OF EMPIRE, my guess is the events seen in "A Tragedy of Errors" occurred six or seven centuries after GAME.
Ad astra! Sean
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