Four senses:
curling purple mists and a floating face (sight);
rolling, quivering ground (touch);
rumbling, shifting strata and voices singing in the fog (sounds);
the viewpoint character, Langdon's, sense of direction (kinesthesia).
There are "three hurtling moons." ERB's Mars/Barsoom has two. Langdon is on a planet called Tanith where he sees what is described as a "temporal mirage" of a long dead city with winged inhabitants.
Tanith is an extrasolar colony where men do not age so that Langdon is another "immortal" character. In well-established sf jargon, Earth is referred to as "Terra." We encounter familiar echoes of other genre sf stories.
No doubt all will be made clear but, for me, that will have to be after a lunch break.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have a vague recollection of a "Tanith" somewhere in the Technic stories (but I might be wrong).
I like Earth also being called Terra, and I sometimes do that myself.
Merry Christmas! Sean
I don't remember a Tanith in the Technic.
An internet search finds worlds named Tanith in Pournelle's Codominium series & H. Beam Piper's Terro-Human future history, but not in Anderson's Technic History. It is one spelling for a goddess worshipped in ancient Carthage and the name of an asteroid.
And the name of an sf writer, Tanith Lee.
Kaor, Jim!
Thanks! The Pournelle connection might well be why I thought "Tanith" seemed vaguely familiar to me in an SFnal context.
Merry Christmas! Sean
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