-SM Stirling, The Sea Peoples (New York, 2017), Chapter Eighteen, p. 268.
"...ancient..." means before the Change in 1998. In our ancient world, skin color was not an issue and did not become such until the trans-Atlantic slave trade.
"...the distinctions of the old world meant little in modern times, as opposed to more realistic and well-grounded concerns like your faith, clan, tribe, city-state, family alliegances or ties of lordship."
-op. cit., p. 269.
Poul Anderson, contributing to Larry Niven's Known Space future history, describes a human being who is very black because of generations spent on an extra-solar planet. See here.
ERB's Black Martians are humanoid with very dark skin but do not otherwise resemble black Earthmen. Another impossibly humanoid extraterrestrial race is the Vulcans in Star Trek. There is even a black Vulcan in a later series. Do the Vulcans exactly reproduce every Terrestrial difference of skin color and other physical characteristics?
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And in the latter part of GENESIS, the humans Gaia "resurrected" using stored genetic material are described as blacks with blond hair. Because humans had adapted to a hotter, expanding Sun by becoming black.
Sean
Paul:
Diane Duane wrote a Star Trek novel, My Enemy, My Ally, which involved the Enterprise rescuing an all-Vulcan crew. There's an amusing scene when Kirk comments to himself on the fact that Vulcans are NOT all of them dark-haired (nothing mentioned about skin color, though):
"On some level he had become conditioned to their being dark, and usually tall. But here were gigantic seven-foot Vulcans and little delicate ones, Vulcans slimmer even than Spock and Vulcans much burlier.... And there were fair Vulcans, blond and ash blond and very light brunette, and, good Lord, several redheads—"
The bit about "more realistic" modern social categories is done with ironic intent; to the person thinking that, his own social context is "more realistic" because it's the one he's been raised in and it -feels- real to him. Being a merchant of the city-state of Corvallis is something close to the core of his identity; so is being a Jew. Skin color just doesn't -feel- important.
All human social groups are "imagined communities" -- they're real enough in practice, because if enough people believe something the belief itself has power. In parts of Montival the reciprocal obligations of lordship and vassalage are believed in with great intensity, and therefore people have to take them into account willy-nilly.
Likewise, noble status or lack of it is very important.
But skin color has simply ceased to be a social marker at all. There's a family of Counts whose founder was what we'd consider black; in his family's history, this gets translated to his being descended from African princes, just as others of his class claim to be the blood successors of French, British or Spanish nobility -- in fact, they're the grandchildren of a mix of SCA re-creationists and a random selection of thugs and strong-arm artists. (The latter being not untypical of medieval nobility in fact.)
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Your comment about how many of the nobles of the PPA descended from "...a random selection thugs and strong arm artists. (The latter being not untypical of medieval nobility in fact" reminded me of what must have happened in Europe during the two chaotic centuries after the death of Charlemagne in AD 814. The collapse of the Carolingian Empire and the wars with the invading Scandinavian Vikings from the north and nomads like the Magyars pressing in from the east created the conditions in which a new aristocracy, many of whom must have been no better than the gang bangers recruited by Norman Arminger, came to power. And a similar situation occurred in England, albeit in a more deliberate and purposeful manner, after the Conquest by Duke William of Normandy in 1066.
Sean
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