Tuesday 5 May 2015

Words In Starfarers, Chapter 10

Poul Anderson, Starfarers (New York, 1999).

"This region of central North America was now a vicarial preserve." (p. 78) (I still do not get what "vicarial" means here.)

"[The street's] indurite was beginning to show the wear of feet and wheels through the centuries." (ibid.) (I was not sure whether "indurite" was a future building material imagined by Anderson.)

"...a nameplate, a mon, an ancestral portrait, a line of calligraphy, a stone from a far planet..." (ibid.) (These, including the mon, are tokens of families.)

"A few adults walked or rode purring motorboards." (ibid.) (I thought that "motorboards" were imagined but there is something about them on the Internet.)

"A neochimp servant..." (p. 80) - a hint of Planet Of The Apes?

"...the vicarial bureaucracy." (p. 81) There it is again.

Surnames change over the generations. Because of time dilation, the seventy year old Michael Shaugnessy meets his hundred and ten year old great-grandson, Ramil Shauny.

"'The Vicar of Isen, though, the overlord hereabouts...'" (p. 82) That explains it.

This chapter was not part of the Kith series but describes Kith Town on Earth, 750 years after the departure of Envoy. The Kith trade in pure chemical elements, special feedstocks and new data.

No comments: