yeah I know you did not ask!
One of the things I have been doing to pass the COVID-19 slow down is revisiting a lot of the science fiction novels I read years ago.
I’ve been focusing on other authors, but I have also started to reread Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Barsoom series. Just in case you do not know, these are 11 short novels involving an earth man from the 1860s, John Carter, who is transported to Mars by mystical means. There he weds a fabulously beautiful princess and has all sort of swashbuckling adventures involving much sword play and mountains of corpses.
Reading his novels I begin to feel sorry for authors that followed him. If any individual adjective has a finite number of times it can used across the space-time continuum, then Burroughs has certainly used more than his fair share. This leaves a dearth of available adjectives for those authors who wrote after him. But then again not putting one or more adjectives with every noun might not be a bad thing. Perhaps by forcing this scarcity of adjectives it was a blessing for the readers of those subsequent writers.
Be well.