In Stephen Baxter's sequel to "The Long Remembering," as in Harry Turtledove's sequel to Three Hearts And Three Lions and in Terry Brooks' sequel to "The Queen of Air and Darkness," a generation has passed. In "The Lingering Joy," the daughter of Anderson's protagonist mentally travels to the period of the gradual extinction of the "goblins"/Neanderthals. The story raises theological issues familiar from other Anderson works. A seminarian seeking meaning, our heroine sees a Neanderthal male child in a crib below a supernova.
In the heroine's home period, Baxter introduces events that, initially, seem like intrusions. An alien "Artefact" has been found in Clavius on the Moon. 2001? But a space battle is being fought for possession of the Artefact and, by the end of the story, the space war is moving closer to Earth. Suddenly, this might explain why temporal psycho-displacement has been possible along the world-lines of ancestors but not of any descendants.
14 comments:
Hi, Paul!
Truth to say, I found "The Lingering Joy" one of the less convincing stories in MULTIVERSE. One glaring point being the "aggressive" role taken by the female lead character back in the ancient past. I thought it unconvincing to show an early modern hominid woman taking on the big game hunting role universally limited to men, as far as we know, in the ancient past. For eminently sound and sensible reasons of greater phyical srength and stamina, recall!
Sean
Sean,
I think that pregnant or breast-feeding women could not easily creep or run after meat animals so women gathered, providing the "daily bread" of fruit and nuts, while men hunted, providing the rarer luxury of meat, except when maybe a whole tribe cooperated for example to drive a mammoth off a cliff.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
Exactly, I've read of just that in the "Beringia" section of THE SHEILD OF TIME, where the MALE hunters of the Cloud People tribe of paleo-Indians drove a mammoth into swampy ground where it would get mired and the hunters would kill it at leisure. Then the women of the tribe would come to help in butchering and processing the mammoth.
But it still remained true that tasks requiring strength and stamina were left to men, such as hunting; and later, farming, mining, metal working, war, etc.
Btw, I'm almost done rereading THE SHIELD OF TIME. Next I want to read Michael A.G. Michaud's MAKING CONTACT WITH ALIEN CIVILIZATIONS (2010). It belongs to that branch of speculation Poul Anderson also pioneered in with his book IS THERE LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS? (1964). It'll be interesting to see what difference nearly half a century has made in speculations whether intelligent life exists on other planets.
Sean
No doubt men did most of the big game hunting, but that doesn't prove that no women ever did any. A woman at one end of the bell curve for physical strength and stamina may be stronger than many men. Sisilagaita, the second wife of the Norman warlord Robert Guiscard, bore arms and fought beside him. I recall reading about a Mongol princess, a daughter or granddaughter of Kubilai Khan IIRC, who hustled hundreds of horses from would-be suitors whom she defeated at jousting.
Valari may be an exceptionally athletic woman, and we should keep in mind that she is not pregnant, nursing, or burdened with small children. Might she perhaps be a lesbian, or does she just dislike the thoroughly dislikable Kugul?
Best Regards,
Nicholas D. Rosen
Good thinking.
Paul.
Sometime in the last year or two I saw a short article about evidence that among the very early humans to live in South America, women engaged in big game hunting. IIRC those who found the evidence thought maybe the abundance of big game then made it more worth while for women to help in that activity that to search for edible plants etc.
Kaor, Nicholas and Jim!
Nicholas: Drat! Somehow I missed, overlooked, or forgot about this comment of yours. Yes, I agree there would be EXCEPTIONS to the general rule about what it would be believed right or practical for women to do.
Jim: What I said above seems applicable to the case you mentioned: there would be exceptions to the general rule. I would simply stipulate that the need to care for infants and small children would very likely lessen the participation of women in some activities.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean:
Breastfeeding does rather push infant care onto the mothers, but once the child is weaned, anyone can care for the child.
The greater *average* size & strength of men over women tends to mean more men will be qualified for some tasks than there are women so qualified, but there are very few tasks that could not be done by either men or women.
And is it known what the relative size and strength were in past ages?
Kaor, Jim!
To begin withe question asked by Paul: if we can go by the averages we see now, women in the past were about 25 to 30 percent less strong than males, and often quite smaller. That alone would make it more likely the heavier, more physically demanding or dangerous tasks would be believed rightly handled by adult males.
And as far back as it can be traced, the rearing of children, even after weaning, was done by the parents. Or close kin. By the family, not communally. In large part because the year around sexual "availability" of women gave males a stake with staying with one woman. And women gained providers who had reasons to stay mated to them, because of both sex and reasonable assurance her children were THEIR children as well.
Ad astra! Sean
"And is it known what the relative size and strength were in past ages?"
Good question.
I have read somewhere that in some burials that were excavated, the remains were initially believed to be male because they looked quite robust & had weapons included in the grave goods. A closer examination revealed the remains to be of a woman. Appropriate genetics, nutrition, & exercise can make a woman stronger than an average man, though there will still be many men stronger than her.
I have looked at the men's & women's powerlifting records. The women's records are quite a bit short of the men's records even for the same weight class. However, they are substantially heavier than what a merely fairly fit man, eg: I, could lift.
As I recall some of the burials I mentioned were on the Eurasian steppe. That region seems to be the origin of many of the 'Amazon' legends. There were more woman warriors there than in most societies.
https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691147208/the-amazons
Kaor, Jim!
But these were only EXCEPTIONS, not the general rule thu out history and pre-history.
Ad astra! Sean
The general rule is that men are on average larger & stronger than women, and the standard deviation of strength in both sexes is large enough compared to the difference in averages, that there will be plenty of women stronger than the average man, though never matching the strongest men.
Kaor, Jim!
No objection to that. There are always going to be some exceptions to general rules.
Ad astra! Sean
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