Two Fight Scenes

In my childhood, fight scenes were everything.

"I was caught by the neck, by the hair, by the arms, and pulled down. It was indescribably horrible in the darkness to feel all these soft creatures heaped upon me. I felt as if I was in a monstrous spider's web. I was overpowered, and went down. I felt little teeth nipping at my neck. I rolled over, and as I did so my hand came against my iron lever. It gave me strength. I struggled up, shaking the human rats from me, and, holding the bar short, I thrust where I judged their faces might be. I coud feel the succulent giving of flesh and bone under my blows, and for a moment I was free."
-HG Wells, The Time Machine (London, 1973), 12, p. 83.

"An ape cast a stone it had been carrying. The missile smacked Tolteca's temple. Pain blinded him. He lurched, and then they were on him. Thick arms dragged him to earth. His nose was full of their hair and rank smell. Fangs snapped yellow, a centimeter before his face. He struck out wildly. His fist rebounded from ridged muscle. The drubbing and clawing became his whole universe. He whirled into a redness that rang."
-The Night Face, VIII, pp. 616-617.

The Time Traveler fights the Morlocks which have turned out to be the hidden enemy of 802,701 AD. Tolteca and Raven fight the mountain apes which turn out not to the hidden enemy on Gwydion. When the two men have escaped, Raven is able to reason that their opponents were merely proto-intelligent animals.

Two phrases resonate with other works of sf:

Tolteca exclaims "'Oa!"; (I, p. 551) (Scroll down)
Raven is also the name of an important Wellsian character.

Words And Texts

Sometimes one book reminds us of another, then reflection reveals the similarities. When a Superman comic had reminded me of a Robert Heinlein novel, I was surprised to realize the similarities: both works had a lunar setting and both referred to parallel universes.

Poul Anderson's The Night Face made me think of the science fiction-based superhero series, Green Lantern. Both works involve regular faster than light interstellar travel and a mysterious planet, peaceful but with a hidden conflict. This description makes them sound closely parallel, which is entirely misleading. In fact, it was another minor feature of The Night Face that initially evoked Green Lantern.

Any word can have a specific denotation, a general connotation and accidental associations. Thus, the phrase, "the Pope":

denotes the present incumbent, Bergoglio;
connotes an entire historical institution in the Catholic Church;
reminds me of my single visit to Rome decades ago.

An author skilfully deploys denotations and connotations but cannot control the accidental associations in his readers' minds. By the same token, a reader must not let his associations get in the way of the author's meaning. That I disliked something in Rome is irrelevant when reading an account of a Pope.

The unusual word "Oa" is the name of the mysterious planet in Green Lantern and is also an interjection used by a character in The Night Face. Associations cannot be more accidental than that.

Cosmic Themes

Superheroes are derived from sf because Superman is extraterrestrial. However, some superheroes are more explicitly sfnal than others, e.g., the Green Lantern is not only a superhero based in a fictional American city but also a member of an interstellar corps organized by the Guardians of the Universe based on the ancient planet of Oa. Further, the Guardians' main enemies are from the antimatter universe.

Thus, those of us who read Green Lantern comics in the 60s encountered cosmic themes addressed more substantially by Poul Anderson and James Blish (see Between Galaxies), which explains why Larry Niven later contributed to Green Lantern.

Anderson, Blish and Niven are future historians. In Niven's Known Space future history, some non-human races are expected to flee to the Magellanic Clouds before the radiation from the galactic core explosion reaches the outer edges of the spiral arms. Thus, Niven's trans-galactic reach matches that of Anderson or Blish.