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Comment by jerf

For those who have not dipped into the so-called Golden or Silver Age science fiction, Chandler's pastiche is quite accurate. There was a lot of what TV Tropes (warning: TV Tropes) refers to as "Call A Rabbit a 'Smerp'": https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/CallARabbitASmee...

Even the mere act of walking out to one's "car", opening the door, getting in, and zooming away could be an act of adventure.

It would still be quite purple [1], though. A well-known trope of the time. For some reason TV Tropes hadn't covered it yet, though, so I guess we should cut the authors some slack on that front.

I would consider "My breath froze into pink pretzels." effectively unredeemable, though. Malzberg's rehabilitation attempt on that fails, in my opinion, and by the time someone wrote around it I think the surrounding prose would already have passed the Purple Event Horizon itself.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Purple_prose

parent jerf 2 years ago

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