Before we start reading a story, we do not know where or when it is set, whether on Earth or elsewhere. Usually, some early words focus on a particular place and time although there may be initial confusion or even deliberate misdirection. Let us engage with the text of "The Nest."
The first person narrator had been hunting near the Styx. Is the story set in the Greek mythological hereafter? He has spent "...years in the Nest..." (p. 71), as yet unexplained. He shot at a sabretooth so we are in a place where such animals still exist, maybe like Conan Doyle's Lost World? He is armed with a powderhorn and two flints and is:
"...thinking bitterly of the cave and The Men and a wet cold wind blowing off the glaciers of home..." (pp. 71-72)
- so he sounds like a displaced caveman. But "...you got rich, working out of the Nest, if you lived..." (p. 72), so he has learned a lot since leaving home, not only how to hunt with a rifle but the mere concept of getting "rich."
He rides an animal called Iggy which he soon tells us is an iguandon although he lives in a community where others use horses. Where and when are they? He passes wheat fields and orchards worked by slaves whose overseers greet him. Next there are rose gardens, houses, a castle and a reference to a local ruler called "...Duke Hugo..." (p. 72). Are they in an alternate world that combines aspects of different periods of ours? The narrator apprehends a badly bruised runaway slave who pleads in an unknown language, then he sees that her pursuing owner is a swatika'ed Nazi wielding a Boer sjambok.
OK. We have completed the first three pages of the text and are increasingly confused about the when and the where so all we can do is read on...
3 comments:
It's an interesting early work of Poul's, though the worldbuilding isn't as smooth as it would become in his later stories.
Eg., the way the Nest is run.
It makes sense for the Norman adventurers to have agriculture to feed themselves and their warriors, but why are they running it like a plantation with a labor force of slaves -- and slaves who are captured soldiers just like the ones they recruit to fight?
Historically, prisoners of war were used as slaves because they were what was available, but it was always considered dangerous.
The lords of the Nest, though, have all of human history to scour. It would make much more sense to bring in peasants from some suitable area and era -- say Napoleonic central Europe -- and set them up on farms, and then take a share of their crops.
Much less supervision necessary, and much less danger of revolt. In Norman Sicily, where the founders of the Nest come from, slaves were used for domestic service and occasionally for specialist tasks like raising sugar-cane, but not for growing food or raising livestock.
Excellent (and historically well-informed) thinking!
Paul.
Gentlemen:
Dang! Why didn't I think of that at any of the times I read "The Nest." I mean, I should have caught on to the inefficiency of slaves for agriculture. And that it was much more sensible (and safer!) to set up a system of tenant farming.
Sean
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