"'You don't have to go, not yet,' Braganza Diane said, a little desperately because she cared for him and our trumpeter blows too many Farewells each year." (pp. 212-213)
How could we have forgotten that? Well, we do remember tones but misremember details. And this reminds us of a passage in Anderson's A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows where Flandry and Kossara, as members of their respective armed forces, speak of remembering their dead... (Can anyone out there locate this passage?)
There are other details to notice in the opening pages of "The Pirate." The Dordogne country is not only:
"...in the fullness of time..." (p. 212)
- but also:
"...steep, green, altogether beautiful..." (ibid.)
As in The Peregrine, written earlier but set later, Trevelyan is summoned by a "machine" (p. 212) but this time he updates his terminology, referring to his summoner neither as a computing machine nor an integrator but as a "computer"! (p. 213) (We still use the archaic phrase, "time machine," because of Wells.)
After all this build-up, all that remains is to reread the story and to re-accompany Trevelyan and Smokesmith on their mission to the planet called Good Luck.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I dunno, any machine capable of artificially transporting us to different eras of time, past or future, would accurately be called a "time machine." That kind of terminology doesn't feel so archaic to me. What would you prefer to call such a device?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Not a preference, really. Just that we no longer say, "flying machines," although I once heard a friend's grandfather say it, but "time machine" has stuck only because of Wells. We can think of other terms like "chronomobile" but they will not catch on.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Airplanes are literally "flying machines."
Absolutely, "chronomobile" is totally unsatisfactory! We should stick with "time machine."
Ad astra! Sean
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