-Robert Heinlein, Double Stars (New York, 1957), 1, p. 5.
That is an opening sentence. The scene is a bar where a badly dressed but arrogant man has just walked in. When I read novels by Heinlein etc in the 1960s, they were an introduction not only to adult prose sf but also to adult life like bars. Poul Anderson's "The Pirate" was published in 1968 although I did not read it that far back. It assumes bars. Trevelyan Micah makes inquiries of chance-met drinking companions in dives where drug smoke stings his eyes and tracks his quarry, Murdoch Juan, to:
"...the discrete and expensive Altair House." (p. 139)
In Anderson's The Peregrine, published, like Double Star, in 1956, Trevelyan's garb immediately identifies him as a Solarian when he enters the Comet Bar in Stellamont on Nerthus and this time his intention is to make contact with some Nomads. Feigning drunkenness, Trevelyan works hard... How easily bars can really be used in this way in the real world is another matter.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That bit you quoted from Heinlein's DOUBLE STAR rang a bell in my mind! I recalled what I thought was an analogous text from Anderson's "How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson. And this is what I found in that story in THE EARTH BOOK OF STORMGATE (Berkley: 1978, p. 61), James Ching narrating: "...a journeyman merchant of the Polesotechnic League who didn't bother with any identification except the skin weathered beneath strange suns, the go-to-hell independence in his face, which turned me sick with envy."
I can well imagine explorers and merchant adventurers in expansionist and pioneering eras being cocky, even arrogant. They've often earned the right to be like that!
Ad astra! Sean
Apt.
Kaor, Paul!
Glad you think so!
Ad astra! Sean
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