Nicholas van Rijn introduces:
a repeating dart-thrower with a belt feeding darts to a swivel-mounted wheel turned by a walking beam;
a ballista throwing large stones to wreck walls or sink boats.
He thinks that someone like Miller or de Camp built the first dart-thrower.
Walter M. Miller Jr. wrote A Canticle For Leibowitz which gives us one of the fictional immortals.
L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall is one of the precursors of Poul Anderson's Time Patrol. See "The Time Travel Archives," here.
De Camp's time traveler introduces a weapon on this cover of Lest Darkness Fall.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think it was the Greeks who invented ballistas and dart throwers. Which the Romans took over and developed to be VERY devastating.
Sean
Sean,
I think that van Rijn is faking it when he talks about Miller and de Camp!
Paul.
Paul and Sean:
As well as fantasy and sf, de Camp wrote (carefully researched) historical fiction. One of these, The Arrows of Hercules, is about the first known military ordnance program, conducted around 399 B.C. for Dionysios, the tyrant of Syracuse. The main character is a real though obscure man, Zopyros of Taras, to whom some siege engine designs are attributed. de Camp presents another real figure from Taras, Archytas, as Zopyros' friend and co-worker. The Author's Note at the end of Arrows states:
"There is no positive reason to think that Archytas and Zopyros ever worked as engineers for Dionysios and invented the catapult; but nothing is known to make it impossible, either. It could" have happened...."
A funny moment in Arrows comes when Archytas uses "technobabble" to talk an incompetent supervisor into not interfering with the inventors:
"The trouble with the pivoted model is that in the hootnanny position, the gadget interferes with the thingamajig, and that throws the doohickey out of line. The only way to prevent this is to parallax the gimmick, and that keeps the thingumbob from equalizing. So whichever way we approach the problem, the result is always the same: it doesn't work. You follow me, don't you, sir?"
Unwilling to admit that what he heard made no sense to him, the boss says, "I see what you mean. Funny I never thought of that." and lets them get on with their work.
History records that one Spartan leader, when shown a ballista dart, exclaimed in horror that such machines of war set at naught the strength and glory of human combatants. "O Herakles, the valor of man is extinguished!" Stirling, in The Reformer, has a character independently echo that ... or, rather, quote someone else who came up with the line on his own.
David,
So van Rijn was referring to that de Camp novel?
Paul.
Paul:
Possibly. That's all I can say on the matter without using a Ouija board, or visiting a woman at Endor, to ask Poul Anderson himself.
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
I think Poul Anderson was indulging himself with an inside SFnal joke when Old Nick mentioned Miller and de Camp!
David: alas, I've not read those stories by De Camp. But I do have his book THE ANCIENT ENGINEERS. And De Camp mentioned these engineers in the book.
And I have read as well Drake/Stirling's THE REFORMER and its sequel, THE TYRANT. Set in the time line, on another planet, as that of THE GENERAL books.
Sean
The de Camp historicals are well worth reading -- he did his research carefully. Though he was less good, IMHO, at getting the feel of the ancient world than, say, Mary Renault.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And it was precisely Sprague De Camp's accuracy which helped to make his books so appealing to me. Even if, as you say was the case, Mary Renault did the "feel" of past times better.
I probably never "got" into Renault's books because of my preference for hard SF.
Sean
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