"Wherefore Flandry walked through smashed ruins under a red dwarf sun, with a few raindrops falling like blood drops out of great clotted clouds."
-Poul Anderson, "The Game of Glory" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 303-339 AT p. 304.
Clouds like clotted blood?
Is Flandry a "Defender" or a conqueror?
"...he was lonesome among his fellow conquerors..."
-ibid., p. 306.
On Mars in the Harvest Of Stars History:
"Corpses lay strewn among blackened, twisted hulks. Behind them, the hills out of which the guerillas had struck rose dark, torturous, riddled and seamed with hiding places, toward Arsia Mons and a sky the color of clotting blood."
-The Fleet Of Stars, 20, p. 252.
The sky matches the scene on the ground, of course.
"...landscape tumbled away in black desolation, weirdly pocked and riven, under a sky gone murrey."
-ibid., p. 256.
"Murrey" is one of Anderson's words that I had to google and my computer does not recognize it.
We, editorially speaking, are reading about a historical revolution and also about the Inrai outrages on one future Mars.
(For the full story, please read The Fleet Of Stars. I comment only on whichever arbitrary details catch my attention.)
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Just a small error, the bit about Brae came from "The Game of Glory," not THE GAME OF EMPIRE.
The Brae affair was very bad, there was no need for the Empire to occupy the planet, it was nothing like Jihannath.
I googled, "Murrey" is a heraldic term used for coats of arms and is of a dark reddish-purple color.
Ad astra! Sean
For more about Jihannath interested readers might look up Appendix I of my "Futuristic Sex" article, where I discussed it in some detail.
Ad astra! Sean
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