The Daily Life Of The Future II

Orbit Unlimited, part four. 

What details have we already noted? See Some Details On Rustum. (I was bound to have noticed Joshua Coffin's reference to Lazarus.)

Although Jan Svoboda thinks of the airbus that he flies as "...this old rattletrap...," (p. 97) it and others like it are:

"...still so scarce and expensive as to be publicly owned..." (p. 100)

Svoboda, an engineer on Earth, is an iron miner on Rustum and has built his house beside the line that carries ore from his pit to the steel mill. In his garden, a phoenix nest lit by luminous fungi is "...like a goblin lantern." (p. 114). I am picking out colourful or notable details but there is much more where this came from.

"The wind, slow and heavy, rustled withering leaves with a sound which was not like October in New England, nor like anything Earth had ever heard." (ibid.)

Poul Anderson always tells us what the wind is doing: "...slow and heavy..." matches the mental states of his characters at this stage of the narrative. Although this wind is not October in New England, merely mentioning this does evoke October in New England! (Ray Bradbury, very unlike Anderson, has an evocative title, The October Country.)

There is more pathetic fallacy with the wind:

"The wind ruffled a loose lock of Mother's hair and made the trees sigh around her voice. She talked low and carefully..." (p. 103)

Appropriately, this wind, not heavy, makes the trees sigh around Mrs Coffin's low voice. Even casual readers must be subliminally affected by Anderson's fully integrated texts.