An Andersonian technique is to appeal to at least three of the senses in a descriptive passage so how does the following passage, set in the Rustumite lowlands, grab us?
"The air hung windless, hot and heavy. It was full of odors, pungent, sweet, rank, bitter, none recalling home. Sounds came loud - a background of trills, whispers, buzzes, rustles, purling water; footfalls..." (p. 29)
We notice:
windlessness instead of Anderson's usual wind;
heat, odours and sounds - indeed three;
furthermore, an overload especially of the second and third;
"home" is not Earth but the colonized High America plateau above the permanent cloud cover, effectively a different ecology.
We know that all of these sensations will be having a very unpleasant effect on Danny Coffin who has never recovered from a terrifying experience in the lowlands when he was young although we also expect that this story will be a turning point. Something significant usually happens or changes in a short story. In Anderson's "Rescue on Avalon," Jack Birnham overcomes his antipathy to Ythrians. See Reconciliations.
See also The Rustumite Lowlands.
3 comments:
It's an alien environment, and one which most humans could not endure for long.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
It must have been a lot like the lowlands of Imhotep, in a different "history," esp. since it seems to have been the case no humans at all could "naturally" breathe there at all.
Unless humans had used oxygills of a kind working in reverse of the 'gills used by Starkadian Tigeries to breathe in Terra type atmospheres. I'm still I never thought of asking Anderson about that in the long letter I wrote about THE GAME OF EMPRE.
Ad astra! Sean
Correction. Second paragraph, second sentence of my above comment: "I'm still sorry I never thought..."
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment