Tuesday 23 July 2013

"What of the hunting, hunter bold?"



"What of the hunting...?" is in one of Rudyard Kipling's Jungle Books. Check it out. It's good. (See here.)

Meanwhile, the hunting scene in Poul Anderson's "Honorable Enemies" is almost comical and could be presented as such, maybe in an animated cartoon:

the Terrans are, of course, human beings;
their hosts, the Betelgeuseans,are squat and blue but humanoid;
their fellow guests, the Merseians, are tailed and green but humanoid;
the Merseians' henchman, Aycharaych, is feathered instead of haired and golden-skinned but humanoid;
they hunt large, winged "dragons."

However:

the existence of even one humanoid alien race is improbable;
hunting is a Terrestrial pass-time;
dragons are a Terrestrial myth.

Thus, what we have here is essentially a Terrestrial scenario despite changed skin colors, extra body parts and exotic details like red mist drifting in through an open window of the Sartaz's palace.

Hunting is the Merseians' favorite sport. Also, in the revised version of the text, Flandry and Aycharaych wonder whether the ancestral Betelgeuseans had developed the dragons for sport, then designed the ecology around them.

On a more serious note, Aycharaych's people, the Chereionites, have full citizenship in the Merseian Roidhunate in the original but not in the revision. Anderson has increased the Merseians' racist supremacism. In the "earlier" alternative history, events could have diverged: other races, gaining prominence in the Roidhunate might have diluted or diverted its single-minded treatment of diplomacy as war by other means, with a different eventual outcome for the two empires.

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Hi, Paul!

I don't think it's that implausible to think at least some non human rational races might be "humanoid," that is be use two legs for walking and two upper limbs for arms. Poul Anderson speculated that evolution might gradually cause various species to more and more use the forelimbs for gripping and tool making. After all, any race will need some kind of hands to make use of its intelligence.

But, Anderson also speculated about "centauroid" races. That is, races using four limbs for walking and moving and the foremost limbs evolving into arms and hands.

And unless there are herbivorous races, my view is that most xenosophont species will be either omnivores or carnivores. Which means hunting will come naturally to such species. And eventually such races will domesticate various animals as sources of meat.

And I don't see non Merseian races diminishing or "diverting" the Roidhunate's racial supremacism, at least not in Flandry's life time. What we glean of Merseia's racist theory of empire in ENSIGN FLANDRY and A CIRCUS OF HELLS does not make me think the Roidhunate would give up trying to undermine and subvert the Empire till its own people started losing faith in their "divine" status as the God's chosen race.

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
Yes, because Anderson went on to present the Merseians as completely uncompromising, I think that his revision of "Honorable Enemies" had to include depriving Chereionites or any other subject race of Merseian citizenship.
Intelligent races will need a means of manipulating their environment so it is plausible that forelimbs initially used for locomotion will be freed for manipulation. When I saw a simulation of small raptor dinosaurs running on two legs with forelimbs raised above the ground, I wondered what they were doing with those forelimbs.
Paul.