Abrams And Avenden

"An image jumped to view. Abrams could spot individual differences between nonhumans as easily as with his own species. That was part of his business. An untrained eye saw merely the alienness."

-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 14.

"[R] took out a photograph and handed it to Ashenden.

"'That's him.'

"To Ashenden, unused to oriental faces, it looked like any of a hundred Indians he had seen. It might have been a photograph of one or other of the Rajahs who come periodically to England and are portrayed in the illustrated papers."

-W. Somerset Maugham, Ashenden (London, 2000) AT 7, p. 117.

Who could resist juxtaposing these two passages even at this time of night and even when trying to read Maugham instead of Anderson?

Both Abrams and Ashenden, the latter a fictionalized Maugham, work in intelligence but Abrams is better than Ashenden in this aspect of the work. How different are their settings! Long may we read different kinds of fiction.