Monday 29 December 2014

A Few Details In Margin Of Profit

(i) "The office was big, an entire side transparent, overlooking a precipitous vista of Djakarta's towers, green landscape hot with tropical gardens, and the molten glitter of the Java Sea."
-Poul Anderson, The Van Rijn Method (New York, 2009), p. 139.

This is the kind of colorful detail that makes it worthwhile to reread Anderson's works. The office belongs to Nicholas van Rijn. Although the story focuses on the activities of a few key individuals, we imagine the population living and working in the Djakarta towers, cultivating and enjoying tropical gardens and sailing on the Java Sea.

(ii) Early extrasolar colonization is called the Breakup in Sandra Miesel's Chronology of Technic Civilization (pp. 611-619) but I wondered whether this term was used in the texts. See here. It is, in this van Rijn story and in at least one Dominic Flandry story.

(iii) Janie (p. 148), native to Avalon, grows in van Rijn's Kilimanjaro mansion just as livewell, also native to Avalon, grows in the floating city of Delfinburg.

(iv) Van Rijn wears a "...cloak of phosphorescent onthar skin..." (p. 147). I thought that this was an animal from Ramnu. However, Ramnuans ride "...onsars.."
-Poul Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (New York, 2012), p. 5. 

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