Posted by Rodger Whitlock on March 20, 1998 at 14:54:17:
In Reply to: A Real-life Lutwen Atoll posted by Rodger Whitlock on March 19, 1998 at 15:34:56:
: I'm reading Oliver Sacks' "The Island of the Colorblind"...
I know it's not usually done to follow oneself up, but further on in Sacks' book he mentions the totally colour-blind sister of one of his colleagues. She accomplished the remarkable feat of knitting a sweater with patterns in 16 different colours of yarns...and, in a truly Vancean turn of phrase, these are described as "dim browns and purples."
For me, one of the great joys in Jack Vance's writing is the incredible descriptions of sensory phenomena: subtle nuances of odor, taste, texture, colour, shape, pattern, sound, atmospheric distortion, silence. I know of no other writer so attuned to these things.