Twilight World

Poul Anderson was a good and very prolific writer of science fiction who occasionally was great.

I recently picked up his novel Twilight World. Its a competent and interesting science fiction adventure, though the MacGuffin that drives the plot is a little hard to believe. Taken as a whole, I would recommend it only to SF buffs or people in airports.

But towards the end of a book of workmanlike prose . . .

[the situation here is that an exploring party sent out by the good guys’ first manned expedition to Mars has been ambushed and captured by the bad guys, who secretly have sent mounted an expedition of their own. The good guys are mounting a prison-break so that one of their number, Collie, who is a world-class endurance runner, can get back to their base to warn their expedition. The great, loutish Russian, Ivanovitch, his role in the prison-break is to hold off the guards long enough for Collie to get clear.]

The Russian felt a blow that brought whirling darkness. He lurched in his tracks, dropped to one knee, and gave the remaining guard a burst. The working party was coming around the ships. Ivanovitch crouched where he was and fired at them.

There was no pain. There was a huge numbness where he had been hit, and he seemed strangely light. Like being drunk, he thought. The approaching soldiers seemed to double themselves and become one again, they seemed to waver and ripple. It was like looking at them through water, through the cool, green water of Earth.

He saw himself. Blood and smoking air, his suit was torn open by the gunfire burst and so was he. Nobody else could have kept going this long. His heart clamored in his breast, but be still felt as if he himself were very far away, happily drunk back on Earth. He knelt in the Martian sand and fired.

Got to hold them off, got to let Collie get away, can’t remember why butitdoesn’tmatterwhygottodoit.

There is a great buzzing now, as of many bees, there are bees humming drowsily through a wild field of clover, all the world is drunk with summer. Lie down in the clover, under a tree that is full of wind and sunlight, lie down and drink the smell of clover through your nostrils, and a million million honeybees zum zum zum. Oh, there are horses running in the field, sunlight flows like cool water off their flanks, there is the good clean smell of horses. Let me rest my head in they lap, O woman, let thy hair flow over me, it is a tent of summer, I can see Earth’s sky through the strands of thy hair, let me sleep for a little while, for I have drunk deep and now it is growing dark. Soon there will be stars.

[Collie gets away and starts the run of his life. He depletes his first oxygen tank. Then he depletes his second. He keeps running. He is close enough now to see the base.]

Then the blackness ran together, and rose up and hit him in the face, and he fell down into the great, waiting ocean.

—

The hook bites and claws itself fast. For a moment you jerk, in the utter astonishment of pain and awareness, down in a lightless dream. Then you feel the line drawing you upwards.

Sunlight burns in a watery sky. Almost, you can see the monstrous shape of the Fisher, but your brain is a dimness with only the red-hook slash to give it color. And you know, blindly and horribly, that the Fisher will drag you up into the sunlight.

You clamp on the leader and pull away, rushing down again toward the bottom of the sea. Your head slams around, your whole body, at the savage jerk of the line. You thresh about, bending yourself into an arc, biting fins and tail into the cool, soft water and the darkness. The line is drawn wire-taut and your whole being is one great No.

Up then, tugging and yanking and ffighting, aware only of the hook and the hard light, wishing only the sea depths. From a million miles away, the Fisher speaks, and his voice booms and echoes, through the hollow cosmos. Crazily, you fight, and break the surface. The dry, sharp air is a knife in your gills, the light is a hot roaring fire in your eyes. The voice of the Fisher resounds between a million watching stars.

He’s coming around.

Good writing in modern, literary works often suffers because the point of the writing is that its pretty. One advantage of genre fiction is that the book usually has to be about something, so the pretty passages can point to something beyond themselves. Also, it helps that in imaginative fiction crazy stuff can happen, so the reader half-accepts the metaphor as reality (in the book’s terms) so the metaphor has more force.