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Chapter 2 of Guardian of the Zercons begins

Just south of the Plebar City there stands Rectum Valley, a dark shadow of a gorge, appearing almost removed from life itself. Hollow stumps of melon trees, standing smaller within their new gray textures, dot the land as the faint image of a path remains frozen in the ground.

I really don’t think I need to comment further. Valleys don’t stand. It’s that simple.

With so many possibilities to talk about, tonight let’s just focus on one word: cascade. Cascade implies a downward movement — waterfalls cascade, sunlight could cascade through the trees to the forest floor.

But Voigt is more creative than that:

The horse whippets, galloping along beneath them, strain in the melting light that beamed from cascading walls to glistening dome dwellings.”

and

“The horse whippets cascaded to a trot…”

Emphasis and ellipse added.

This first sentence seems to imply that the “melting light” really is melting the walls, which are, apparently, now falling down. I’m just not sure how else to take “cascading” as an adjective.

And I simply have no idea how anything can cascade to a trot. If the horses (again, Voigt is overly cleaver in naming things) were galloping I suppose they could cascade, i.e. slow, to a trot. However, earlier in that paragraph he tells us that the “horse whippets were slowing now.” This means that they increased speed, which goes against any connotation of cascade that I know.

Voigt has a similar problem with the word “glisten”. Everything seems to glisten in the novel — wet things, dry things, dark things, light things. There are simply too many misuses of the word in the first chapter and a half for me to go into them all. You’ll just have to trust me.