Tuesday 24 June 2014

In The Trees

A Tree-dweller on the colony planet Unan Besar tells Flandry why his ancestors began to live on the branches of the giant trees. (See here.) Early in planetary history, competition from the large plantations drove free yeomen into subsistence farming with the high price of antitoxins preventing improvements. One bad year meant selling land to the plantation owner. Yeomen owing money became tenants or slaves.

Some peasants sold what was left to them and moved to the Trees of Ranau where they were:

safe from the greed of the great land-owners;
removed not only from urban corruption and violence but also from rural ignorance and poverty;
able to help each other.

Interstellar free trade will change their way of life but this change is not to be feared because their lives have been restricted by isolation and the cost of antitoxins. Flandry reflects:

"...revolutions don't originate with slaves or starveling proletarians, but with men who have enough liberty and material well-being to realize how much more they ought to have."
-Poul Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (New York, 2012), p. 125.

Yes. Or with a population that has grown used to a good standard of living but then sees it threatened. The deprived and oppressed might Rise Up In Their Wrath but are more likely to be atomized and demoralized with no idea either that they have anything to fight for or that they are able to fight for it. Flandry makes a revolution with the people of Ranau.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the price for the antitoxin pills needed for living on Unan Besar was NEEDLESSLY high, even allowing for the obsolete technology used by Biocontrol for manufacturing the pills. Biocontrol quickly realized that control of the producing and distribution of the antitoxin would give it the power to set any price it wished on the pills. Which in turn meant it RULED Unan Besar. Political, rather than natural market forces were fixing the price of the pills, which would otherwise have been far lower.

Sean