Davis Bertram:
exercises in double gravity, like Dominic Flandry;
misses coffee, like Time Patrollers;
must not disrupt the societies that he visits, like the Enterprise, Okies and Time Patrollers;
becomes involved in local wars, like a lot of space and time travelers.
In some ways, we learn what to expect, even though we seek the unexpected. Entirely predictable sf fails. Poul Anderson succeeds.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And we also see the Emberversers of the old American states of Washington and Oregon missing coffee! Once communications and trade with the restored Kingdom of Hawaii restarted, coffee became a highly desired import from Hawaii.
SEan
Highly valued and expensive. It's interesting how many of the most important trade items of the early modern period, in the empires of sailing ships and muskets, were mood-altering drugs, or addictive -- tobacco, sugar, coffee, tea. Dyestuffs like indigo were also important, and luxuries like spices and silk and Chinese porcelain.
Those were the things that could bear the transport costs, but it was the drugs that first became items of mass consumption -- refined cane sugar was an exotic luxury treated like a drug in medieval Europe, but became a staple in some countries over the course of the following centuries, and coffee and tea and tobacco followed.
Whole regions of the earth like the Caribbean and Virginia and Brazil were reorganized to produce them, and others became dependent on those trades indirectly -- most of the non-plantation colonies in North America earned a lot of their foreign exchange selling foodstuffs and working livestock to the sugar colonies, to give just one example.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I do see what you mean. And we all know of how addictive and UNHEALTHY tobacco is. Nothing could be done, post-Change, for diseases caused by smoking tobacco.
But I had not thought before of how sugar, coffee, tea could also be considered drugs. Interesting, that the old English colonies of N. America sold foodstuffs and livestock to the sugar colonies.
Sean
The tobacco habit dies out in some parts of post-Change North America, and remains in others (like Wisconsin) that actually produce tobacco.
People would probably have different attitudes towards health risks. As Ingolf thinks at one point, some of the oldsters seem to think that if you're extremely careful you'll live forever...
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I would have hoped ONE good thing came of the Change, that it killed off tobacco smoking. And I'm sure physicians in civilized post-Change states would be discouraging tobacco smoking, because NOTHING could be done about emphysema, lung cancer, throat cancer, etc., post-Change. Some nations might even forbid or heavily tax imports of tobacco from the old Wisconsin for that reason.
Sean
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