- although it would have been well within his abilities to do so.
The ingredients are present for all to see. The most basic is that another planet must harbour both a fully human race into which our hero can marry and also savage beast-men whom he must fight. A second ingredient is a gallimaufry of dangerous wild animals including, in the Land that Time Forgot and the Earth's Core and on SM Stirling's Venus, dinosaurs coexisting with human beings. Stirling has done what Anderson could have done, including a scientific rationalization for the retro-Solar System.
At the end of The Sky People, there is a two-tier transition to the alternative Mars which we will reread next.
Any ERBian cast of characters includes an obvious villain/traitor/saboteur etc. Stirling, like Anderson, is considerably subtler in his characterization. (Not difficult.) Marc dislikes the pompous British guy, Blair, so we expect a major conflict between them but that does not happen but something does happen about Blair...
Introducing the wheelbarrow works as well on this Venus as it does in ancient Rome.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree in regretting how Anderson never tried his hand at writing pastiches of ERB's Tarzan or John Carter of Barsoom stories. I like the stories set on Barsoom/Mars better, so I would have preferred John Carter pastiches.
Anderson did write a story using Robert E. Howard's brawny Cimmerian hero, CONAN THE REBEL, which is richly worth reading.
PA also wrote science fictional mysteries whose heroes were based on a certain Great Detective, such as "The Queen of Air and Darkness," "The Case of the Martian Crown Jewels," and "The Adventure of the Misplaced Hound" (with Gordon Dickson).
Ad astra! Sean
Tho' that Conan pastiche has been labelled CONAN THE LIBERTARIAN... 8-).
Howard was very busy -- you had to be to make a living writing in the 1930's. But at his best, he's very descriptive without piling on the adjectives, and he has a good grasp of characterization. His Conan has a sense of humor, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! I thought of that too, how Anderson's Conan was implausibly libertarian.
I recall reading of Howard being more prosperous than his neighbors in Cross Plains because of his writing skills--and during the Depression! Alas, grief over his mother's approaching death caused Howard to commit suicide.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Yeah, he -appeared- more normal than H. P. Lovecraft, but he really wasn't. Creative and high-IQ people are often rather unstable.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can believe that--and it might even be some explanation of the peculiar behavior of some of the Roman Emperors, esp. Nero. Beneath all the grossness and cruelties, Nero did show some strains of the talents of Julius Caesar and the Emperor's great great-grandfather Augustus.
Ad astra! Sean
Yeah, but you have to combine talent with realism about other people. Augustus was a master at that. He let people -pretend- that the Republic had been restored.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Certainly, and that was Nero's failing, not accepting that he could only go so far before fatally alienating too many powerful men. If Nero had ruled like Augustus, he might well have died of old age on the throne.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: Short-term thinking. People truckled to him -- as he could order them killed -- but he didn't calculate on them intriguing in secret. That's a bad lapse for a ruler.
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