Newport harbor had been too shallow for the large steel ships of pre-Change commerce but now easily accommodates many large sailing ships and oar-propelled tugs. There are wagons, drays, bicycles, pedestrians, carts selling roast potatoes, fish sandwiches and sausages, also the clamor of smithies and "...the pungent smell of hot tar and oakum." (p. 363) This reminds us of many similar scenes in Poul Anderson's works, e.g., Portolondon. Both authors celebrate human social life and activity.
Although Newport is on Earth, not on an extrasolar planet, and cannot be a high tech metropolis like Archopolis or Ardaig, nevertheless it is a single scene in a complicated future history of the twenty first century, now two generations into the Emberverse. In any future history, human beings cope with whatever catastrophes their author creates for them.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Isn't Newport also a dependency or possession of the city state of Corvallis? I recall, before Montival arose, the neighbors of Corvallis tended to be annoyed by the rather financially aggressive Corvallans. That might not matter too much once Corvallis joined Montival as a member state.
Sean
Sean,
It is but I find Emberverse politics very complicated.
Paul.
Yes, Newport is Corvallis' window on the Pacific -- they took it over early, and then worked to recondition the railway linking the two, through a low point in the Coast Range.
It's horse-drawn, of course, but horses can draw at least 15x as much on rails as they can on even a good road; the rolling friction is that much less.
Corvallis tends to arouse wonder, envy and irritation in about equal measure -- it's relatively urban and relatively densely populated in a sea of rather sleepy little small rural communities, and commercially expansionist.
The university makes it a cultural center, and it has a lot of (small-scale) manufactures and a lot of merchants and bankers. It's also more culturally diverse, in a world which tends to be (locally) uniform.
It's the sort of place restless and ambitious youngsters move, and Newport is the base for shipbuilding, and ship-born trades that span the whole planet, or at least the parts accessible by water, as commerce picks up again. There are a lot of transient foreigners there, some from very far away.
Its great rival is Astoria, the port-city at the mouth of the Columbia, which is a chartered city (autonomous, ruled by its guilds) of the PPA. There's a scene in Astoria in THE DESERT AND THE BLADE.
By the 2040's, there are a number of thriving cities in Montival -- not very large by our standards (none more than 60-70K people) but bustling places. Astoria is the outlet for the Columbia Valley, Portland is the crown city of the PPA, and Salem is being revived as the capital of the High Kingdom.
Kaor, Paul!
But that very same complexity of Emberveser politics is one of the things that makes Stirling's works so realistic. Real world human politics are just as complex, or even more so.
Sean
Sean,
Indeed, Emberverse is up there with Middle Earth and the Technic History.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thought so, Newport was controlled by Corvallis. And I have seen you explain in the Emberverser books how even horse drawn railroads can be efficient. Or even railroads propelled by putting the relevant parts of bicycles into them.
And your description of Corvallis and how restless and ambitious young men would tend to flock there reminds me of how my maternal grandfather, at age 16, left the family family farm in New Jersey to seek his fortune in New York City in 1892. I'm sure one of the reasons my grandfather did that was boredom with farm life. And he did prosper in NYC!
Yes, as trade and culture revived, cities like Corvallis and Astoria would become dominant, albeit they would never be as HUGE as pre-Change cities like NY.
Sean
Sean: You might like: Girl Waits with Gun (A Kopp Sisters Novel)
by Amy Stewart. It's set in New Jersey (the countryside near Patterson) in the early 1900's, and based on real events. As far as I can tell it's extremely well researched.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree! And I would include Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind stories as well.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks! I will look up Amy Stewart.
Sean
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