Thursday 7 August 2014

1984

Wanda Tamberly is in the alpha timeline:

"25 March 1984, 1337 hours. Gray weather, low clouds, wind noisy across fields and in trees not yet leafed, slight spatters of rain."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 356.

I did not realize until I started to quote this passage but here is another neat little natural description. What I was after was Wanda's reflection:

"(Had the weather been the same in the destroyed world? Probably not. There, humans had cut down the vast American forests, plowed the plains, filled skies and rivers with chemicals.)" (ibid.)

She copes not only with changed history but also with changed weather. But she adds:

"(They also invented liberty, eradicated smallpox, sent spacecraft aloft.)" (ibid.)

Wanda's timeline is worth restoring.

1984, that fateful year that gave us Big Brother and Room 101, was safely in the past when Anderson wrote this novel and projected his character into an alternative 1984.

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