Saturday 3 August 2024

Autumn In Starfall

Mirkheim, XIII.

Autumn is gentle. Hermes tilts less than Earth. Walking across Pilgrim Hill to the Old Keep, Sandra sees:

green trees and hedges
crimson daleflower
whitefoot
blue skyberries
yellowing birch leaves
purpling fallaron leaves

Maia shines through haze. Mild air is slightly tanged. Wings trek.

Sandra sees:

gleaming river
Starfall stretching east to the bay
westward, farms and Cloudhelm

Stillness. She remembers an autumn twenty-two Hermetian years previously at Whistle Creek with Pete. A lot has changed. As in any effective novel, Poul Anderson captures human life and the passage of decades.

4 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Pretty darn near ideal, the climate of Hermes, at least for humans. We would find the drastic seasonal changes of climate on Talwin (in A CIRCUS OF HELLS) downright horrifying!

Ad astra! Sean

Jim Baerg said...

Though in some ways Earth might be better with a slightly greater axial tilt.
Part of the reason the last glacial period ended was the earth's axial tilt was near its maximum, so summers were hotter leading to glacial melting.
This also meant the belts of rain or drought shift seasonally north-south more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_humid_period
So the southern part of the Sahara got more summer rain & the northern part got more winter rain. A greater axial tilt means high latitudes get warmer summers & the regions near 30 degrees north or south of the equator get a rainy season. More of the planet becomes habitable.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Jim!

Intriguing, despite me thinking summers in Massachusetts plenty hot and rainy already.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

The Sahara was never exactly wet, but it was much more so. And Lake Chad was as big as the Caspian Sea once. Philip Jose Farmer used it for a somewhat-time-travel series: Tarzan gets sent back about 16,000 years...