In Poul Anderson's Technic History, we read about what Nicholas van Rijn is doing back on Earth while his trader team is elsewhere. In this chapter, we read about the conflict between David Ryerson's wife and his father in the Outer Hebrides while David is in space. The wind and, more generally, the hostile Northern environment, takes its part in the conflict.
"On Skula you huddled indoors against the wind..." (p. 90)
"...[snowflakes] carried no warmth with them, there was not going to be a snowfall tonight." (ibid.)
(Warm flakes precede a storm?)
"The wind streaked in from a thousand kilometers of Atlantic and icebergs." (ibid.)
Tamara feels the cold and thinks of Atlantic and icebergs, then feels:
"...the wind keening down from the Pole." (p. 91)
She remembers David saying something that encapsulates Anderson's fiction:
"'My people were Northerners as far back as we can trace it - Picts, Norse, Scots, sailors and crofters on the Atlantic edge - that must be why so many of them have become spacemen in the last several generations. To get away!'" (pp. 91-92)
Vikings, Norse mythology and hard sf.
This evening, sf group, interrupting posting.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"The Bitter Bread" is another story by Anderson showing us an elderly retired spaceman living in the same general region (the Orkney islands, I think). And Earth is also ruled by a hereditary Protectorate in it. But a different background from THE ENEMY STARS.
Ad astra! Sean
Also interstellar teleportation.
Kaor, Paul!
But with no teleportation in "The Bitter Bread," an idea Anderson seems to have moved away from after "The Ways of Love."
Finished rereading QUESTION AND ANSWER. A readable, competently written story with some interesting ideas. But not, I admit, one of his better stories. Also, since it was first pub. in 1954, it belongs to PA's early phase as a writer when he was, in many ways, still learning how to write. THE LONG WAY HOME, first pub. in 1955, already showed how he was getting better.
Ad astra! Sean
I thought there was teleportation in "The Bitter Bread."
Kaor, Paul!
No, there isn't. It has a different background, with a different Protectorate.
Ad astra! Sean
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