On Aeneas

The Day Of Their Return, 2.

"East of Windhome the country rolled low for a while, then lifted in the Hesperian Hills." (p. 76)

The planet, Aeneas, had appeared in a single passage in The Rebel Worlds. Now Poul Anderson develops Aeneas in detail. In fact, I think that The Day Of Their Return is the only Technic History novel to be set entirely on the surface of a single planet. In this chapter, it is early summer. Imported oak and cedar are intensely green but rasmin is purple. We are not told the colour of the overarching delphi. The grass-equivalent land cover, fire trava, is not green but onyx tinged with red and yellow. In Anderson's novels, we are always aware that another planetary environment would not look like Earth. 

By day, the fire trava smells of flint and sparks. At night, it curls up into a springy mat. Ivar Frederiksen is not lying merely on a differently coloured grass. Born to this environment, he is not reflecting on Aenean plant life and indeed has problems of an entirely different order.