Adzel is described in every story where he appears. With Jim Ching as narrator, the description is perhaps more telegrammic than usual:
"...four hoofed legs supporting a spike-backed, green-scaled, golden-bellied body and tail; torso, with arms in proportion, rising two meters to a crocodilian face, fangs, rubbery lips, bony ears, wistful brown eyes -" (p. 64)
In Senses And Scenes, we paraphrased Alexei Panshin by writing:
"Vance, Bradbury and Anderson were sensual; Heinlein was functional."
What Panshin wrote, more precisely, was that Heinlein tells us not what men or machines look like but what they do, not how a monster appears to human beings but whether it attacks them. Lummox in The Star Beast lumbers or gallops on eight legs and gobbles a Buick and a mastiff but we get our idea of what his whole body looks like only from cover images or from the interior illustrations in the Scribner edition. We are not given any visual description like Anderson's repeated accounts of Wodenites, Cynthians, Ythrians, Merseians etc.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Some of Anderson's stories, like A STONE IN HEAVEN, were illustrated. What pleases me about the illustrations in STONE was how the artist who created them carefully read the story before he started drawing. His depictions of what Anderson's non-humans were faithful to how he described them--such as a Chives who was elderly by that time.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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