Free Essays - The Hounds of Tindalos :: Hounds

Textual AnalysisThe Hounds of Tindalos The Hounds of Tindalos is a short acquirement fable story containing many and varied elements that hand over been long associated with the musical style of science fiction. This essay will identify these elements, examining their status at bottom this short text and also the interchange of these elements with the characteristics of other genres, to a greater extent specifically, horror. Belknap Long, the author, was clearly intent of incorporating the elements of horror within the genre of science fiction and this amalgamation of these two genres was a popular combination employed by future horror and SF writers. Perhaps the inclusion of horror within the SF genre is a comment in itself about perceptions of SF held by writers, the elements of horror creation a cautionary warning to those in the science world. Longs main character is Halpin Chalmers, a self proclaimed rebel and back of originality and lost causes. From the start it is clear there are present within this text some elements of the SF genre that seem to be in comely about every SF story, beginning with the main character. Many writers have as their main characters people who are non-conformists, who wish to boldly go where no one has gone before and who are willing to take patently illogical and irrational risks in the hope of furthering makinds scientific discoveries. Chalmers is no expulsion in this as he willingly partakes in an ancient Chinese drug that is a known powerful hallucinogen in a bid to go back in time. There is of course the proverbial wet blanket in the shape of the narrator, known only as Frank, who believes his friend Chalmers to be quite mad, but who never-the-less agrees to aid his friend in his bizarre experiment despite the risks he is taking. Frank represents all those characters in SF stories who are the skeptics, the non believers, who have a solid faith in the science of the present, and who consider characters like Cha lmers to be eccentric and bizarre. The setting of The Hounds of Tindalos is in the latterly 1920s and the location is Central Square. Chalmers apartment room is where around of the story takes place. The room is in keeping with Chalmers character as a rejector of modern science and one who is still entranced with the diachronic side of science and history preferring illuminated manuscripts to automobiles and leering stone gargoyles to radios and adding machines.