Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen and SM Stirling's Nantucketers demonstrate firearms by killing an animal. One Nantucketer explains:
"'...the bullets would strike through any armor a man could carry, and send his spirit to the realm of Nergal.'" (Against The Tide Of Years, Chapter Eight, p. 135)
(Incidentally, Mike Carey, writing John Constantine: Hellblazer, reveals that the demon Nergal's full name is Nergal Draanu Veiatroformis Memoth Asrokhel.)
The Nantucketers have traveled to a time before standing to attention had been invented (see here):
"'Close-order drill and standing to attention hadn't been invented here yet; the king's guards were alert, but there was little formality to their postures." (p. 134)
Reading modern military precision back into ancient periods would be an easy mistake to make in historical, or prehistorical, fiction.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Is Friar Roger Bacon truly credited by some with inventing gunpowder? I thought gunpowder was invented in CHINA when the Chinese of the late Sung Dynasty were desperately struggling to fight off the invading Mongols. And then gunpowder spread westwards along the trade routes.
Sean
Sean,
Blish, of course, is writing fiction. I think there may be some idea that Bacon did discover gunpowder but, if he did, its secret died with him.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
True, what you said about Blish writing a historical novel. But, a good historical novel respects known facts about the persons and places described. So, I did wonder if gunpowder was independently discovered by Roger Bacon.
Sean
"fight off the invading Mongols. And then gunpowder spread westwards along the trade routes."
In the long run gunpowder spreading along the trade routes protected by the Mongol Empire was a disaster for the Mongols & all the other steppe nomad peoples.
For millennia the steppe nomads had been a serious military threat to all the sedentary agricultural people living near the steppe. Once handheld gunpowder weapons became reliable & quick firing, anyone needed them to confront an enemy who had them. However, to make guns one needs metalworking equipment which is difficult to move, so any nomad tribe needs to get guns from a non-nomadic people & so becomes at best a junior partner in an alliance with one such people against another non-nomadic power.
Kaor, Jim!
Unless, of course, a settled agricultural nation with guns collapses into chaos and anarchy. That might allow a nomadic or semi-nomadic people to invade and conquer. I thought of how the internal rebellions which brought down the Chinese Ming Dynasty in 1644 allowed the Manchus to invade and conquer China, setting up the Ch'ing Dynasty.
Ad astra! Sean
According to Wikipedia the Manchu were an agricultural society, so the stationary equipment needed to make guns equal to whatever the Ming had should have been available to them.
Kaor, Jim!
Then I sit corrected! I was going by memory and tried to hedge by saying "semi-nomadic." The Chinese of that time did still consider the Manchus to be barbarians.
Ad astra! Sean
The Chinese called the Europeans who arrived by ship the 'South Sea Barbarians'.
Just not Chinese enough.
Similarly the Greeks called the Persians & Egyptians 'barbarians', not Greek enough.
Kaor, Jim!
Of course I agree. And many peoples who had that kind haughtiness found out the hard way how unwise it was to underestimate the "barbarians."
Ad astra! Sean
Latin "Barbarus" applied to non-speakers of Latin or Greek because they sounded as if they were saying, Bar-Bar-Bar."
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