"...the brilliant shore slip[ped] by across the mother-of-pearl mirror of the sea."
"The yacht...slid quietly across the broad bay, now lemon and gunmetal in the last light, towards the anchorage. The small township beneath the mountains was already dark with indigo shadow in which a sprinkling of yellow lights showed."
I quote these passages because they share the quality of colourful natural description that we regularly find in Poul Anderson's works. However, this is our "other reading" time of the evening. The passages are quoted from:
Ian Fleming, "The Hildebrand Rarity" IN Fleming, For Your Eyes Only (London, 1964), pp. 150-191 AT pp. 187, 189.
How many people associate James Bond with this kind of descriptive prose? And how many also realize that "The Hildebrand Rarity" and a couple of other short stories are not Secret Service adventures but Ian Fleming trying out other kinds of writing albeit with his mascot, 007, remaining on stage?
Flandry is not Bond in space but read both anyway.
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