Similes

"[Ydwyr's] touch on [Djana's] skin was at once firm and tender; its slight roughness emphasized the strength held in check behind. Love flowed through it, into her, and radiated back out from her until the bare small office was aglow, as golden sunsets can saturate the air of worlds like Terra."

-Poul Anderson, A Circus of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 193-365 AT CHAPTER SEVENTEEN, p. 330.

"Flandry saw the bridge crack open. A shard of steel went through Rovian as a circular saw cuts a tree in twain."

-The Rebel Worlds, CHAPTER SEVEN, p. 439.

"He led, and Ajax seconded: they found their Jove-lov'd king

"Circled with foes. As when a den of bloody lucerns cling

"About a goodly palmed hart, hurt with an hunter's bow,

"Whose 'scape his nimble feet enforce, whilst his warm blood doth flow,

"And his light knees have power to move; but (master'd of his wound,

"Emboss'd within a shady hill) the lucerns charge him round,

"And tear his flesh; when instantly, fortune sends in the pow'rs

"Of some stern lion, with whose sight they fly, and he devours;

"So charg'd the Ilians Ithacus, many and might men:..."

-George Chapman (trans.), Chapman's Homer (London, 2002), pp. 180-181.

Anderson could have ended those sentences with "aglow" and "Rovian" and the texts would have been poorer. Homer's simile becomes a short narrative.