A Star And A City

Every event that happens and that involves people is experienced individually and uniquely by each of the persons concerned. Thus, someone is being attacked and possibly killed as we speak. That person experiences the attack from his unique point of view (pov) - which might terminate abruptly. Later, I hear about the attack on the TV news. My pov is also unique - and very different from that of the person attacked. A novelist can describe the same event from either pov. The descriptions differ as the experiences differ.

However, many events do not involve people, e.g.:

"Once there had been a great proud star, bright as a hundred Sols."

-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT p. 1.

So far, it seems that an omniscient narrator is informing us about this star. He - if we can apply such a pronoun to an omniscient narrator - is not, of course, telling us how the star appeared to any particular observer, if there even were any observers in that region of space that long ago - 500,000 years, we are told. He is simply informing us that the star existed. The entire Prologue could have been presented on such a basis. But it is not. A first person narrator comes on-stage. After mention of a planet as massive as fifteen hundred Earths, the text continues:

"There may have been lesser worlds and moons as well; we cannot now say. We simply know that the giant stars rarely have attendants..." (ibid.)

This narrator is not omniscient. He identifies himself as a member of the community that he addresses and lives in Technic civilization at some time after the events of Mirkheim.

After the introductory conversation between Hollister and Karsov, "The Big Rain" describes a city on Venus not as seen by a viewpoint character standing nearby and looking at it but simply in the kind of summary that might have been written by someone who had studied the city. Thus, we are told where the city is, how its technology enables it to survive in that hostile environment, how many people live there, what they do - and the date: 2051 AD.