"[Copenhagen] was the womb of the future."
-The Merman's Children, p. 143.
"From harbors like [Harfleur], a few lifetimes hence, men would set sail for the New World."
-Poul Anderson,"Death and the Knight" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 737-765 AT p. 754.
"...Asian-like clamor of the street below..."
-ibid., p. 753.
Jack Havig says that the Middle Ages had:
"'Huge variations from place to place and era to era, yeah, but always the...Orientalness?...no, probably it's just that the Orient has changed less?'"
-Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), V, p. 45.
These passages look both forward and backward.
There is also a sense of new times and of a possible crossing of the Atlantic in The King Of Ys. Ys did not survive but Europe did develop and expand to the New World.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Iow, Anderson's stories, along with those of Stirling, has a very organic, "natural" feeling to them.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Another point I thought of was Jack Havig mentioning to Dr. Anderson was of how ORIENTAL England felt to him when he lived there for some years in Elizabeth I's reign.
Ad astra! Sean
I think this may have been an error on Poul's part.
Preindustrial Europe was certainly poor and backward by modern standards, and in that it would share some characteristics with underdeveloped countries today.
OTOH, it was also very different from its Oriental contemporary cultures.
Just to name one, it had a very different family and reproductive pattern. Most of the world was characterized by everyone (or everyone female) marrying within about 5 years of puberty.
NW Europe (England in Shakespeare's time, for example) was extremely different that way -- a substantial proportion of women never did marry (or have children), and when they did they generally married at least 10 years after puberty.
Or to name another, it had a different attitude towards technology long before the Industrial Revolution.
As early as the 12th century, inanimate power sources (wind and water, mainly) were used on a vastly larger per-capita scale than anywhere else in the world.
The technology of watermills, for example, was known everywhere from Japan to Ireland, but western Europe had vastly more of them.
Or to take another example, printing and paper were used in East Asia first. But due to the way Bronze Age ideographic and syllabic scripts hung on there, they never really took off the way they did in the late-medieval and early-Renaissance Europe.
This was still more the case in other cultures, like the Middle East. Scribal guilds succeeded in keeping the Koran from being printed right up until the late 18th century.
By contrast in the West, the Bible was printed almost immediately the technology was developed, and printed books became vastly more common than they were anywhere else quite quickly.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very fascinating points! I thought Jack Havig was making a valid point in THERE WILL BE TIME of how "Oriental" England (and, by extension, Europe) felt to him in the late 1500's. But your comments about how more WIDELY used wind and water mills were in Europe (compared to the rest of the world), and paper/printing brought again to my mind Anderson's comments in IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? about the preconditions allowing a true science to arise in the West, not in China.
And I think the very first book Gutenberg printed, around 1450, was the Vulgate Bible! So, while there were fierce arguments about the accuracy of this or that translation of the Bible, and who could authorize them, printing the Bible itself was not a problem.
I do have a vague recollection of how resistant many Muslims were to printing or translating their Koran. I myself have read Dawood's version.
I noted with interest as well your comment about how the ideographic/syllabic writing systems of east Asia held back the use of paper/printing. What might have happened if China had developed a true alphabet only needing the 26 characters of the Roman alphabet?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: things would be unpredictably different.
The Chinese writing system, because it's ideographic, expresses "Chinese" in an abstract way largely divorced from the spoken language. The same symbol can mean utterly different sounds.
Eg., the symbol for 'easy' is 易 but in Mandarin it's something like 'róng yì' while in Cantonese it's 'ii' (usually written with a tonal marker, for a tone that doesn't exist in Mandarin.)
So if the ideographic writing system hadn't been maintained, neither would the cultural uniformity of Chinese civilization. For that matter, many "Mandarin" dialects are mutually incomprehensible too, though not as foreign to each other as Mandarin and Cantonese.
(Cantonese is derived from the same Han-period language, born south by migrants, but has changed much less -- it's archaic compared to Mandarin. Rather like Icelandic and English.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, history in China would have been completely different if an alphabetic rather than an ideographic writing system had been developed. I've wondered because I've read of how difficult it is to master written Chinese. Instead of something like the 26 characters of the Roman alphabet, students have to master TEN THOUSAND ideographs for basic literacy in Chinese.
And I have also read of how important it was for the various dynasties and regimes ruling China to have a single, standard, state imposed writing system used by all educated persons in China. Because it was used as a means of enforcing unity--otherwise those different dialects of Chinese would have developed into languages as different from each other as French is from Romanian. Which in turns means the different regions of China would have gone their owe ways, independently of each other.
Ad astra! Sean
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