Tuesday 3 March 2015

Pir Panjal

SM Stirling, The Peshawar Lancers (New York, 2003), p. 114.

Two paragraphs, too long to quote in full, are a beautiful descriptive passage and also pure Poul Anderson. Either SM Stirling was influenced by what I call Anderson's "description lists" or he independently developed this technique.

Athelstane King, returning home, sees:

the house with its wings and annexes;
the grounds with their barns, stables and workshops;
Kingsby village with its dwellings, shops and other buildings including four kinds of places of worship;
the Pir Panjal range beyond (see image).

(Four kinds of worship? OK, this is British India so there is a church, a mandir, a mosque and a gurdwara. I would say that these four buildings represent two interacting traditions, prophetic and contemplative, but that's me commenting so let's return to the text.)

Having listed the buildings in Kingsby, Stirling, again in a style similar to Anderson's, colorfully describes the mountain range: blue, crimson, gold, white and pale rose. I had to reread the concluding sentence carefully - "rose" is not a verb but a noun incorporated into the adjectival phrase, "pale rose." Read with appropriate attention, the last two sentences describe the entire mountain range from blue cedars up to "...sun-splashed snow." 

Returning to the opening section of Chapter Seven - in the previous post I summarized an account of the Analytic Engine but omitted its sounds:

clattering of inputted instruction cards;
clicking and ticking of brushes reading the gaps;
barking of orders by supervisors;
"...groaning, querning rumble of metal..." (p. 102);
the sound of the fans needed for ventilation;
"...rattle of rail carts..." (ibid.);
the rumble of the water that powers the turbines.

That this massive Engine is a purely mechanical, pre-electronic computer is emphasized by the old-fashioned garb of its supervisors: "...black coats and tall stovepipe hats..." (p. 101) Could the course of history really have been that different? So far, the novel has two distinct fictional premises: the Fall and a psychic ability exploited by the Empire's enemies.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

Yes, I agree, I think it's very likely that S.M. Stirlling took note of Poul Anderson's "description list" method and adopted it for his own use.

And I think it would be possible that the black frock coats and top hats seen would survive for a long time for various reasons. One being a desire to preserve pre Fall apparel for nostalgic reasons. Another being that frock coats and top hats might have become a kind of uniform being worn here by top ranked scientists and technicians.

Sean

John Cowan said...

Specifically, it's Charles Babbage's Analytical Engine, the first design for a digital computer (never built in his day, but constructed with only 19C tools and materials in our own, thus proving its practicality).

Sean M. Brooks said...

Dear Mr. Cowan,

And I would be interested to find out more about this modern day building of Babbage's "Analytical Engine." I do recall reading there were SOME technical difficulties in the 19th century which discouraged it being made.

Sean