Séroni

The **séroni** (singular **sorn**; the plural is sometimes given as **sorns**) are one of the three hnau species of Malacandra. They are thin, fifteen-foot-high humanoids having coats of pale feathers and seven-fingered hands.

While the Séroni were white and lived in the mountains, there was another type of Sorn called Soroborn or red sorns.

## Description

Ransom is at first scared of the séroni due to their appearance, and it takes a while to get beyond this prejudice:

*The face ... took a good deal of getting used to—it was too long, too solemn and too colourless, and it was much more unpleasantly like a human face than any inhuman creature's face ought to be. Its eyes, like those of all very large creatures, seemed too small for it. But it was more grotesque than horrible.*
Like the hrossa, the séroni are an object lesson to Ransom in how not to judge:
"*They were quite unlike the horrors his imagination had conjured up, and for that reason had taken him off his guard. They appealed away from the Wellsian fantasies to an earlier, almost an infantile, complex of fears. Giants - ogres - ghosts - skeletons: those were its key words. Spooks on stilts, he said to himself; surrealistic bogey-men with their long faces....Ogres' he had called them when they first met his eyes as he struggled in the grip of Weston and Devine; 'Titans' or 'Angels' he now thought would have been a better word. Even the faces, it seemed to him, he had not then seen aright. He had thought them spectral when they were only august, and his first human reaction to their lengthened severity of line and profound stillness of expression now appeared to him not so much cowardly as vulgar. So might Parmenides or Confucius look to the eyes of a Cockney schoolboy!*"

## Culture and homeland

The Seroni are reserved and solitary shepherds. They live in mountain caves of the high country, (*harandra* in the speech of the eldila), and unlike hrossa they can tolerate thin air. They often descend into the *handramit* where they raise giraffe-like livestock.

Séroni are the the philosophers, scientists and scholars of Malacandra, specializing in science and abstract learning. Their technical level is high, and they design machinery, which is built by the pfifltriggi. They are more interested in abstract principles than technology.

Although they have their own language, Surnibur, and they can write, they do not compose written works of history or fiction as they feel the hrossa are superior at it. Their sense of humour "seldom got beyond irony" (Chap. 18) and is dry and sardonic.

## Sorns

* Arkal
* Augray
* Belmo
* Falmay

## Pop Culture

Sorns appear in volume two of *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* by Alan Moore, in which all fictional stories take place in the same universe, along with many other literary Martians. When "the Molluscs"--the "Martians" from H. G. Wells' *The War of the Worlds*, actually invaders from outside the solar system--attack Mars, they are fought by many Martian races, including the Tharks from Edgar Rice Burroughs' *A Princess of Mars* and the Hither People from Edwin Lester Arnold's *Lieut. Gullivar Jones: His Vacation*. The invaders are finally repelled when the Sorns, previously thought mythical by other Martians, arrive and turn the tide of battle, forcing them to invade Earth instead. Additionally, a winged Martian from Wells' short story "The Crystal Egg" is identified as Sorn whom the Molluscs have captured and grafted wings onto as an experiment.

The hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi are several of the races living on Mars in Larry Niven's 1999 novel *Rainbow Mars*; they are referred to as the "Pious Ones" by the Barsoomian races. The hrossa are called the "Fishers", the pfifltriggi the "Smiths", and the séroni the "High Folk".

The séroni appear at the beginning of the second volume of *The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen* as one of the Martian races allied against the "mollusc invaders" (the Martians from The War of the Worlds).

In *Scarlet Traces: The Great Game*, a hieroglyphics-filled chamber seems to show the hrossa, séroni, and pfifltriggi as the original races of Mars, that were wiped out by the arrival of the War of the Worlds Martians.