In the opening paragraph, a human father addresses his son. In three short concluding paragraphs, an Ythrian thinks of her human friends.
Opening:
"'You can't leave now,' Daniel Holm told his son. 'Any day we may be at war. We may already be.'" (I, p. 9)
Imminent war grabs our attention. Excitement. Not fear for us since this is fiction. War means change in the lives of individuals and maybe in the life of their society. For some, life is so bad that (they think) any change can only be for the better.
Closing:
"Muscles danced, wings beat, alive to the outermost pinion. The planet spun toward morning. My brother, my sister have found their joy. Let me go seek my own.
"Snowpeaks flamed. The sun stood up in a shout of light.
"High is heaven and holy." (XIX, p. 176)
The aliveness of an Ythrian in flight. Morning. New beginning. Andersonian descriptions: flame; shout of light. A line from a traditional Planha carol quoted earlier in Chapter I - alliterative verse:
High is heaven and holy.
4 comments:
Fear is usually part of combat, and a good writer can get that across, usually by physical description of how it -feels-. OTOH, there are people who are genuinely fearless.
Usually they're a bit weird. A friend of mine's father was one -- he volunteered for raiding parties because he "didn't like to be bored".
Stirling:
Since you first mentioned that guy, I've wondered whether a person like that would be good to have on your side, or would he be too much of a loose cannon.
I suppose in some cultures he would be a berserker, or the same thing under a different name.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
A bit oddly, perhaps, your comment about your friend's father reminded me of what the Austrian Field Marshal Radetzky said of one of his subordinates, General Haynau: "He is my best general; but he is like a razor; when you have used him, put hm back in his case" (Edward Crankshaw, THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF HABSBURG, Viking/Penguin Books, 1963, p. 67). What
Radetzky meant was that some men are good only for one thing and need to be kept firmly under control.
Ad astra! Sean
In some ways I'm dissatisfied with Crankshaw's book. The title is ridiculous and should have been something like THE REIGN OF FRANCIS JOSEPH. Second, it only really covers the years 1848-1914, the last years of Francis Joseph and the brief reign of his ill-fated great nephew, Kaiser Karl, getting only a brief, rushed, unsatisfactory epilogue.
Ad astra! Sean
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