Fantastic noses
"The Eye of Argon", by Jim Theis, is mocked for... well, many things. One of the speed-bumps in reading it is the description of the female protagonist as having a "lithe opaque nose".
I've just been reading The Complete Dying Earth, an SFBC 4-in-1 collection of novels by Jack Vance. It's been sitting on my shelves, unread, for a couple of decades. For some reason which escapes me at the moment, I was thinking about the classic D&D magic system, in which a magic user memorizes a spell, and then forgets it in the casting. That premise originated in these stories by Vance, so I figured I'd give them a try.
They're pretty clunky.
I also don't care for the protagonist of many of them. He's more than a bit sleazy, and has a high opinion of his own cleverness which is not borne out by events.
But I gather that they were popular in their day, so I'm curious as to how they'll play out. Some were published in F&SF before being fixed up as a novel.
In one of those stories, I just encountered: "a man spare and taut, with a waxen skin, a fragile skull, hooded eyes and a meticulous nose so thin as to be translucent when impinged across a light".
Perhaps this is where Theis drew his inspiration.
I've just been reading The Complete Dying Earth, an SFBC 4-in-1 collection of novels by Jack Vance. It's been sitting on my shelves, unread, for a couple of decades. For some reason which escapes me at the moment, I was thinking about the classic D&D magic system, in which a magic user memorizes a spell, and then forgets it in the casting. That premise originated in these stories by Vance, so I figured I'd give them a try.
They're pretty clunky.
I also don't care for the protagonist of many of them. He's more than a bit sleazy, and has a high opinion of his own cleverness which is not borne out by events.
But I gather that they were popular in their day, so I'm curious as to how they'll play out. Some were published in F&SF before being fixed up as a novel.
In one of those stories, I just encountered: "a man spare and taut, with a waxen skin, a fragile skull, hooded eyes and a meticulous nose so thin as to be translucent when impinged across a light".
Perhaps this is where Theis drew his inspiration.