The Diskos
A reader has a question about AWAKE IN THE NIGHT:
Mr Wright,
I’m having a little trouble visualizing the Diskos. Sometimes I see it as a lance with a cone shaped spinning shaft or blade and sometimes as an ax like weapon. Am I right with either visualization? Ah I have reached the part of the second story that describes a Diskos without the blade.
Happy to help! The diskos looks like a pizza cutter. Or maybe like a unicycle.
I do not have the paragraph in front of me, but I believe that the narrator calls the ‘blade’ of the weapon by the term ‘diskos’ that is, the disk-shaped cutting blade, but he also uses this term for the whole weapon, the same way we might call a sword ‘a blade’.
Maybe a picture will make this clear.
This is what the diskos weapon looks like. It is a two-handed axe whose blade is like a living, electrified sawblade,, if you lived in a universe where electricity was also life-energy pulsing with psychic force.
With the blade dismounted, the forks look like this:
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
