"A Merseian base here, in the buffer region, outflanking us at Catawrayannis...."
-Poul Anderson, "A Message in Secret" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 341-397 AT p. 344.
Well, no. The Catawrayannis that we know is a city on the planet, Llynathawyr, in Sector Alpha Crucis on the opposite side of the Terran Empire. Poul Anderson's galactographical references are usually consistent.
Later, Flandry says that the commandant at Catawrayannis Base will have to send a task force to Altai. But naval HQ in Sector Alpha Crucis is at Ifri whereas Llynathawyr is the seat of civil government.
However, there can be more than one place with the same name. Cynthians discovered Llynathawyr, named it and the city that they built, then sold them to the Terran Empire. Another Cynthian crew must have gone out towards Betelgeuse and founded a Catawrayannis out that way.
"Difficult things have simple explanations. Discuss," as a school English teacher once told me.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
That does rationalizes a possibly worrisome contradiction in "A Message in Secret." I was reminded of how the English colonists who settled the 13 original colonies in America repeated over and over many of the same names for cities and locations originally in England. MA alone has an Essex county and another Boston, copied from England!
Ad astra! Sean
Southern Ontario has a London on a Thames river, a Stratford on Avon, a Perth on a Tay River, a Paris, a Delhi (pronounced Del-hi), and used to have a Berlin before anti-German sentiment during WWI resulted in a name change to Kitchener. There is a village called Kandahar in Saskatchewan, perhaps named by a former British soldier who had been on an expedition into Afghanistan.
Kaor, Jim!
Amusing, how many place names got copied over and over! And that "Kandahar" remnded me of Stirling's THE PESHAWAR LANCERS.
Ad astra! Sean
For further amusement:
I just read part of the Wikipedia article on the Kandahar in Afghanistan, it says it was one of the many Alexandrias founded in the wake of Alexander of Macedon's conquests in Asia. Apparently the current name is the result of centuries of slow change in pronunciation.
Kaor, Jim!
That was entertaining. I knew many of the cities founded by Alexander the Great were named after him. Alexandria in Egypt being the most prominent surviving example.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment