On Xenogaia, the Survivors, as foreigners, manage to prevent a war about reproductive rights among the trisexual Ithagene whose scaled, quadrupedal bodies are non-humanoid and sound fairly disgusting. Anderson is working on his aliens: no head with two eyes above a nose and a mouth here. I mention this because it seems to be the single exotic detail that I have not so far included from the climactic Chapter XIX. The Ithagene appear only in this single incident and nothing about them affects anything else in the novel so Poul Anderson could have written them any way he wanted. But he did come up with something reasonably alien. It remains to reread the historical chapters which I had just started to do last night when it hit me that our Hanno might be the historical Hanno. Always surprises.
Hanno lets slip to Pytheas that he knows that the heavens change over the centuries. Also, Hanno is a man of wide experience and with no kin. Readers slowly suspect his nature. We will follow Hanno and others through history at a leisurely pace.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I never thought the idea of an intelligent race needing three sexes in order to reproduce very plausible. That seems needlessly complicated and dependent on a group of such aliens having members of all three sexes present. Anything might happen that prevents persons of one sex or another from being present--meaning they would have no children. Two sexes, male and female, makes reproduction so much simpler!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
It's conceptually possible trisexual intelligent races exist--but it's still a strain!
Ad astra! Sean
OTOH, unlikely things happen all the time. That the odds are against something doesn't mean it will happen.
Churchill nearly died five to ten times before 1940, for example -- he lead an adventurous life. Starting with campaigns on the NW frontier of India in the 1890's -- lots of Pushtun snipers there -- and going on to the charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman in 1898, and an escape from a Boer prison camp. And he showed up in person at the police siege of an anarchist cell early in his political career.
One little change in the trajectory of a bullet or Mahdist sword, and the world would be completely different.
My friend, Andrea would say, "Fortuna."
Yup. Fortuna rules.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Or Churchill could have been killed when he was struck by a car in New York City, because he looked the wrong while crossing the street! He looked right instead of left.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that too. He -was- fairly severely injured. Six inches further and he'd have been dead... and WWII wouldn't have happened. It would have ended in the summer of 1940 with a negotiated settlement between German and Britain, and God alone knows what would have happened then.
But that's commonplace.
Henry V died fairly young, at the age of 36. If he'd lived to be 70, Britain would probably have ended up as a province of France because he'd have succeeded in uniting the two realms and France was much bigger and richer.
Likewise, if Alexander the Great had lived to 70.
Stirling:
You certainly explored the Alexander possibility in "Conquistador".
I thought it made some sense that without the Muslim-Christian conflict there wouldn't be motivation for some Henry the Navigator analog to sponsor exploration far south along the African coast & far out into the Atlantic.
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