In Ulan Baligh on Altai:
"The streets were wide, clean-swept, full of nomads and the wind."
-"A Message in Secret," II, p. 346.
Really there is nothing remarkable about this sentence. However, I have so often remarked that the wind frequently appears to underline the dialogue, to comment on the action or even to play a more active role in Poul Anderson's texts that I now imagine a personified wind walking along the streets together with the nomads.
When a young woman enters Flandry's bedroom in the Khan's palace and asks him whether he is a Terran spy, he reflects:
"Like a bad stereodrama, the most ludicrous cliches..." (IV, p. 355)
Unfortunately, I cannot find it right now but somewhere in one of his volumes of sf criticism, James Blish, writing as William Atheling, Jr., commented on how bad writers sometimes try to cover their badness by drawing attention to it, thus, e.g., paraphrasing from memory: "I am not making much sense" or "It sounded like something out of a bad spy film." Thus, what is in fact a badly written passage is passed off as if it had been written that way for effect.
Poul Anderson is not a bad writer and should not put himself down as if he were one!
2 comments:
I think it's a legitimate usage in this case.
The problem is that reality is full of outrageous coincidences and often of people whose actions deliberately mimic the fiction they're fond of!
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with what Stirling said and I don't think Anderson was deprecating his abilities as a writer. Outrageous coincidences do happen in real life after all. I was reminded of the catastrophically trivial coincidences leading to Archduke Francis Ferdinand's assassination in 1914.
Ad astra! Sean
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