The Wind Shouted Too

 

Poul Anderson, "The Pugilist" IN Anderson, Conflicts (New York, August, 1983), pp. 89-127.

The opening sentence:

"They hadn't risked putting me in the base hospital or any other regular medical facility." (p. 89)

First person narration plus this guy is dangerous and in a military setting.

There is a war on. Although they are in the US, the narrator's wife works in a co-op and a Recreation Bureau has to ok its employees vacationing at Lake Pillsbury.

A guard has a stunner - a futuristic weapon, I think? The regeneration techniques that the narrator mentions are certainly futuristic.

This guy has been:

"'...charged with treasonable conspiracy against the People's Republic of the United States...'" (p. 92)

- not just individual treason like the narrator of "High Treason."

That phrase, "People's Republic...," is used literally, not sarcastically or ironically.

The narrator's wife, Bonnie, writes to him as John Reed but a political officer addresses him as Colonel Dowling. All will be made clear, no doubt.

The US and the Soviet Union are at war against a Sino-Japanese alliance.

Somewhere during the changes that have happened, the narrator's grandfather shouted with:

"...autumn sumac a shout of red behind him, and the wind shouted too, till I imagined old bugles blowing again at Valley Forge and Shiloh and Omaha Beach. Maybe that was when I first thought I might make the army a career." (p. 94)

(A man shouts so the wind does: Andersonian pathetic fallacy.)

OK? I'm not. We understand some of what is happening but not all of it yet.