Terrans and Cloud Mountain People defeat attacking Neanderthals, using several to me unfamiliar words in the process:
septum (p. 241);
knobkerrie (p. 241);
bracer (p. 242);
to noogie on... (p.246);
sangar (p. 248).
It pays to google. Sometimes, I guess a meaning from context, then learn that the guess was wrong. Thus, an exciting account of a battle is combined with an extension of the reader's vocabulary.
Edgar Rice Burroughs would have given us little more than a colorful setting and exciting battle scenes whereas SM Stirling also develops the mystery of the "Lords of Creation" who have terraformed planets and can control brains.
I do not really buy Stirling's idea, on pp. 229-230, of sf becoming the dominant form of prose fiction. Sf remains a small part of world literature and it would take more than an inhabited Mars and Venus to change this. Of course, his reference to "...resentment in some literary circles..." (p. 230) is mainly a joke at the expense of Norman Mailer and Truman Capote whose fame has declined because of the new respectability of "...pulp trash..." (ibid.)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Well, I prefer "pulp trash" such as Edgar Rice Burroughs Barsoom stories to the hoity toity works of Norman Mailer or Truman Capote! (Smiles)
And your mentioning of the Neanderthals makes this a good time to both express a disagreement I had with S.M. Stirling and an opposing analogy from one of Poul Amderson's stories. I did not agree with how Stirling characterized the Neanderthals we see in THE SKY PEOPLE as "beast men," savages mentally inferior to either the Homo sapiens sapiens residents of Venus or the Terrans who came there. Neanderthals are shown as brutish, most of them close to being stupid, unable to properly speak, lacking in inventiveness, dirty and uncouth, etc.
None of these things fits in with recent discoveries and studies of the Neanderthals, even including evidence being found that some early modern humans mated enough with them that it has been concluded that most non black Afrcan humans have about four percent Neanderthal ancestry. It has been calculated that modern man and Neanderthals share 99.97 percent of the same genes. An idea Poul Anderson accepted in "The Long Remembering," as Argnach reflects about his wife Evavy: "But she had blue eyes and yellow hair like a goblin [Neanderthal]. Folk did say, to be sure, that of old matings had taken place between the two breeds, so that now and again, the light-hued strain appeared in us; but no alive could remember another such child." The suggestion that blue eyes and blond hair came from the "beast like" Neanderthals pleased me, because it's so counter intuitive! To say nothing of how Anderson accepted that Neanderthals and early modern humans were able to mate and have fertile offspring.
I simply don't believe that the only or sole reaction of Neanderthals to contact with modern Homo sapiens was immediate and murderous hostility. Altho "The Long Remembering" is a fairly early story (1957), Poul Anderson depicted Neanderthals there both more accurately and sympathetically.
I do think, and accept, that there was just ENOUGH of a difference between Neanderthals and early modern humans that it gave the latter an edge in competing with the older breed of humans. An idea we see Anderson using when Argnach again thought: "If they have the Power, .., then they should not be afraid of lion or bear. They should not need a fire in front of their home. But they do. Then perhaps, O STar Hunters, that is because they do not have the Power. Perhaps they are not even such good hunters as the Men, and that is the reason there are many animals in their land." But it was only a modest difference in degree, not in kind. I think what happened was a combination of some Neanderthals being assimilated or absorbed into "modern humanity" and others being driven away and eventually dying out.
I do wish S.M. Stirling had shown Neanderthals in THE SKY PEOPLE more as we see them in "The Long Remembering" and more as what recent scientific studies agree they were likely to have been. It would have made for a better, more interestingly complex book. We do see some indications of that, I agree, such as the Neanderthal shaman's "laboratory."
Sean
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