How It Felt

Sometimes an author tells us not only what a character sees and hears but also how his unfamiliar surroundings make him feel. This is harder to convey and also something that we should remember while we read although we don't.

"Despite the desertion, Falkayn got a sense of raw, overwhelming vitality. Perhaps it came from the sheer scale of everything, or the ceaseless throbbing, or a more subtle clue like the proportions of what he saw, the sense of masses huge and heavy but crouched to pounce."

-Satan's World, XV, p. 482.

 

This whole chapter, with Falkayn pressing his thumb down on an unpinned grenade while he confronts Gahood in that being's battleship, is nightmarish.

 

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

On a smaller scale than Lewis's, we remember the terror induced in Eric Wace by the wide horizon of the planet Diomedes in Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts.

Vaster Spaces

Speculatively and imaginatively, what is beyond and vaster than intergalactic space?

We can begin our outward journey in the company of CS Lewis:

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this small ball of Earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."

-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

 

I have always remembered this passage. But Lewis has projected a blue sky and a green plain into his larger space. Let us now follow a three-stage progression with Poul Anderson and Mike Carey:

 

in Anderson's Tau Zero, a relativistic spaceship traverses the vast dark spaces between clusters of clusters of clusters of galaxies;

 

in Anderson's "Door to Anywhere," a man looks into the vacuum where distant universes are visible as small points of light;

 

in Carey's Lucifer: Evensong, God and Lucifer, both retired, meet in a spatio-temporal void where they can see universes begin, briefly exist, then end:

God: Let's take a table at the edge of the terrace. We can watch the creations enjoy their brief efflorescences.

-Mike Carey, Lucifer: Evensong (New York, 2007),  p. 151, panel 4.

 

And maybe that is as far as imagination can take us?

 

Now that we have reached a round number of posts for this month, will I pause until the beginning of next month? Time will tell.

Distances And Vastnesses

In Poul Anderson's The Man Who Counts, II:

Diomedes is about a hundred light-years from Sol;

a secondary-drive spaceship's pseudo-speed is measured in parsecs per week;

Wace and his companions are stranded in the Diomedean ocean ten thousand kilometers from the human trading post;

the horizon is twice as far away as on Earth.

Not the light-years, the parsecs or the kilometers but the visible horizon terrifies Wace.

Nike has a close horizon whereas Daedalus has no horizon, just the planetary surface receding to invisibility and, at night, the sun as a luminous ring not enclosing the landscape but illuminating infinity.

CS Lewis had a similar experience in a different context as a character and the first person narrator in one of his own works:

"I had the sense of being in a larger space, perhaps even a larger sort of space, than I had ever known before: as if the sky were further off and the extent of the green plain wider than they could be on this little ball of earth. I had got 'out' in some sense which made the Solar System itself seem an indoor affair. It gave me a feeling of freedom, but also of exposure, possibly of danger, which continued to accompany me through all that followed. It is the impossibility of communicating that feeling, or even of inducing you to remember it as I proceed, which makes me despair of conveying the real quality of what I saw and heard."
-CS Lewis, The Great Divorce (London, 1982), p. 26.

I think it is time for a comparison between Anderson and Lewis.