Poul Anderson, There Will Be Time (New York, 1973), pp. 116-117.
On p. 116, Jack Havig visits a convent near Constantinople in the thirteenth century. On p. 117, visiting Maurai civilization, he is on the bridge of a huge trimaran where:
the deck is hardwood;
there are sunpower screens but no brightwork because the Maurai are poor in metals;
flowers and vines cover the cabins;
carven figures represent Tanaroa Creator, Lesu Haristi and shark-toothed Nan;
the hull is hydrodynamically efficient;
the masts and vanes are continually readjusted by motors powered by biological fuel cells and directed by a computer;
the crew are kanakas and wahines;
Captain Rewi Lohannaso, an engineering graduate from the University of Wellantoa in N'Zealann, speaks several languages, including Ingliss;
Lohannaso's Ingliss is not the debased dialect of some Merican tribes.
Anderson does not project American superiority into the future.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I still wonder what exactly was the "primary" language of the Maurai Federation? What we actually get is a somewhat evolved form of English, called "Ingliss."
Sean
I have a slight objection to the resource problems of the Maurai future.
It first struck me when reading Poul's story about the blimp-born raiders in one of the early Maurai stories; the local Mexican-descendants are so short of iron that their peasants use obsidian for hoes, they've recycled their wrought-iron balconies for utilitarian purposes, and their cavalry use steel for sabers but fire-hardened wooden heads on their lances.
It's true that we've gobbled up a lot of the world's minerals, but we've done so selectively.
Modern industry -- take the iron and steel industry as an example -- went from using localized, small-scale iron ore deposits (and bog iron nodules) to using massive concentrated ore deposits like those in the Mesabi range, or northern Labrador, or Western Australia.
But the reason wasn't usually that the small local deposits were exhausted; it was because they were uneconomical when steel plants began smelting by the hundreds of thousands or millions of tons, and when per-capita consumption went from a few pounds per head per year to thousands of pounds per head.
You need a concentrated source of ore so you can avoid the aggregation costs of gathering a bit here and a bit there.
But the small deposits are still there -- iron is a major component of the earth's bulk. They're everywhere, in fact.
So if technological civilization came down, we couldn't import megatons of ore from, say, the deserts of western Australia or the jungles of Gabon.
But we could still get the couple of pounds per head per year from the same small-scale local deposits that people used before the Industrial Revolution. There would be plenty for lance-heads, ornamental ironwork on balconies, and hoes.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Many thanks, again, for your very interesting comments. And I agree with you, once you explained. I could argue that in the 1950's/1960's Poul Anderson did not quite realize that metals like iron would still be in plentiful supply, if on a smaller scale.
And, assuming something like Anderson's The War of Judgement or the Change in your Emberverse series, the survivors would also be able to harvest massive amounts of steel from cars and steel framed buildings. So much so, in fact, that they might not NEED to mine iron ore for a long time.
Sean
"that they might not NEED to mine iron ore for a long time"
In "Winter of the World" IIRC the inhabitants of the N. American plains salvage metal from cities in their territory for their own use & to trade with people to their south.
Also IIRC in "Orion Shall Rise" the people of the NW Union have a relationship with people in the more eastern parts of N. America which includes similar metal salvaging from old cities.
My understanding is that the polynesian islands have near zero useful ore bodies and so the Maurai would get some metal from New Zealand, but would mostly get it from the continents bordering the Pacific, whether by new mining or salvage from cities there.
In "Island in the Sea of Time" Stirling has the Nantucketers get steel from the hull of the ferry from the mainland so they don't need new mines for some years.
Kaor, Jim!
Yes, but the point Stirling and I had in mind was that when Anderson wrote the Maurai short stories he hadn't yet realized metals would still be plentiful even after the War of Judgment.
More costly in relative terms, but still abundant. Which is why Anderson walked back the notion of metals being prohibitively expensive in ORION SHALL RISE. And discarded that idea entirely in THE WINTER OF THE WORLD.
Ad astra! Sean
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