Flandry:
"And in that well-worn nick of time, which goes to prove that the gods, understandably, love me, helped arrived." (p. 35)
Manse Everard of the Time Patrol:
"A man had to take whatever the gods offered and they were a miserly lot."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 4, p. 74.
The gods live in our imaginations where they always did. Flandry meets pagan extra-terrestrials like the Tigeries. Everard travels to times when the gods were taken for granted like we take atoms. So maybe "the gods" come more easily into their everyday vocabularies. Comprehensive as ever, Anderson also wrote fantasies in which the gods literally existed.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
But Flandry was simply being rhetorically sardonic in this use by him of "gods." I also recall the amusing bit where he expected his confidential secretary to "clean up" his report, editing out the more tactless parts.
Ad astra! Sean
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