The homeliness of Garth contrasts sharply with the wildness of the artificial caves of the Ardazhiro fortress in the humanly uninhabitable northern hemisphere of Vixen where Flandry, captured, is:
"...led down endless booming halls." (p. 242)
- and has to squint against painful blue fluorescence. Interviewed by his opposite number, Svantozik of the Janneer Ya, Flandry must sit on a floor covered with thick straw and drink from a stream of water running down a groove in a wall. But he has been electrocrammed in the Urdahu language and now knows that the Ardazhiro, despite the recentness of their eruption into interstellar space, understand the human nervous system well enough to impose a new language on it in a few hours. Flandry's investigation continues.
"The ancestral Ardazhiro had laired in caves and hunted in packs." (p. 241)
Imagine an intelligent species that has recently acquired interstellar technology but is still at home in caves and packs.
4 comments:
And they acquired the technology by gift, not by indigenous development.
That will strongly affect their cultural development -- this is a point brought out several times in the Technic series.
You need a certain type of culture/civilization to -develop- this technology; but the ones that can -use- it are a much broader sample.
An example: Japan's early modernization was highly selective. Right up to 1945, for example, most Japanese people -literally- believed that the Emperor was quasi-divine, and acted like it.
And Japanese institutions might be superficially Westernized but much less so when you looked at the details.
For example, the Japanese army used direct physical brutality up and down the structures of rank to a degree that no Western army had for a long long time -- except possibly the Russian army, which was another non-Western society forcibly 'modernized' (twice, in fact, at least).
For example, one punishment drill involved entire units standing in rows facing each other and hitting each other in the face, hard -- hard enough to bring blood and loosened teeth.
You might symbolize it by the way the Japanese adopted Western dress, but until the 1950's-60's continued to wear "fundoshi", the traditional loincloth, underneath it.
And the quasi-feudal structure of Japanese companies, with complex bonds of extreme loyalty is another indicator.
That's what makes Japan, to Western readers, almost like another planet in an sf story.
Paul: there's an old SF joke that most aliens in SF aren't as alien as someone from Japan.
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