Concerning Ythrian public affairs:
"The Planha speakers happened to be the most wealthy and progressive when the first explorers arrived; one is tempted to call them 'Hellenistic.'" (p. 496)
Is one? Who is this "one" that suddenly appears on the page? Pp. 496-498 are a three-page explanatory passage courtesy of the omniscient narrator who should remain the background as much as possible rather than draw attention to himself with a pronoun - if that is what it is - like "one." This reads as if some future historian like Hloch of The Earth Book Of Stormgate is directly addressing his audience and, if that is what is happening, then we would like to know who this historian is, when he is writing and so on. Hloch's Introductions and Afterword in the Earth Book are excellent additions to the Technic History, genuinely enhancing our knowledge of the background of individual stories, and it would have been good if some comparable historian had succeeded him for the rest of the Technic History.
The narrator of the Prologue to Mirkheim uses the pronoun, "We...," (p. 1) thus identifying himself as a member of the population that he addresses.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Simplest explanation, of course, is that "one" was an unnamed historian.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But the rest of this passage is in "omniscient narrator" style. I think that, if a passage commences in this mode, then it should remain in it. There should be no hint that we are being addressed by a person in the same space and time as us.
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