The uses of simile

Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright deploys a bunch of long, showy similes. Why? And what do I hope they do?

Extended similes are a noted feature of Homeric style, much imitated by later poets; the PF offers a short definition with a nice later example from Milton.

One strain of past criticism of Homer sought to use these similes to sketch a finer picture of the life-world from which the Iliad and Odyssey emerged into writing. If such similes draw from the shared experience of poet(s) and audience, the thinking went, then their content and their tacit assumptions must let us grasp something of that experience.

That approach to Homer's similes doesn't leave me fully convinced: it rests, I think, on the idea that similes always reach for the more normal, more familiar point of comparison, when in fact poets are tricksy, slippery sorts, liable, sometimes, to toss out similes just as weird or fantastical as their referents.

That approach to Homer's similes does, however, interest me in the possibilities for epic simile as a vehicle for assumptions today. Cosmic Warlord Kin-Bright has extended similes, and I chose many of them to try to get across how different the characters' experiences are from ours.

So, for instance, I use quite a lot of rural and pastoral similes, because unlike a majority of readers today, the Taru nobility live—or like to think they live—with the passion for land of magnates who own land but don't work it, and with a desire for interludes of otium.

Further distancing the thought-world from us, several of these pastoral similes imply very large insects. Tar's ecosystem is big on big bugs.† Indeed, if you read the poem closely, you will notice one line that reveals, without remarking on it, that what the characters call horses have six legs, not four. This licenses us to imagine that the animals named in the poem are rough functional equivalents to animals in our reality, but are probably not the same, or necessarily very close in appearance or biology.

In the same way, I have a number of similes which compare events or things to elements of the process of asteroid mining. These similes appear in part to tell us that people mine from asteroids, and in part to tell us what that process is like. They have other purposes, too, but those are two of their purposes: something a little more deft, I hope, than having a character start a speech with 'As you know—'

† Possibly too big to be plausible in human-friendly conditions but, you see, I don't worry about that.