Josserek, served by Ori, a Lily Sister, "'...bred for looks...'" (p. 47), reflects:
"I should be used to slavery. The gods bear witness I've seen it aplenty. Even in Killimaraich, where they brag they don't have it, they're a free people, even there they not only keep labor gangs - well, I suppose you must get some value out of convicts - but the waterfronts are full of crimps." (ibid.)
Crimps? As usual in a Poul Anderson text, I have found some unfamiliar words. Googling has not divulged any relevant meaning for "crimp."
Getting "some value out of convicts" is the rationale for the reintroduction of slavery in the Terran Empire of Anderson's Technic History.
Although The Winter Of The World is a stand-alone novel confined to Earth of the distant future, like the Technic History, it is about humanity so that echoes and parallels are to be expected.
6 comments:
Paul:
Google failed, but hard-copy prevailed! My 1972 Funk & Wagnalls lists crimp as "One who gets sailors, soldiers, etc., to serve by decoying or entrapping them." My Merriam-Webster says much the same thing, adding that the earliest usage found in print was from 1758.
So, more or less a press gang, but sometimes perhaps using trickery instead of physical coercion.
David,
Thank you very much.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID and Paul!
David: this time, just for once, you beat me to explaining what "crimps" are! (Smiles) The definition you gave for "crimps" is in the 1973 printing of THE RANDOM HOUSE DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
Paul: we still have crime and criminals, and the problem of what to do about them. Considering what a mess we made of these problems, I can't look so disdainfully down on the Terran Empire for using "slavery" as one means of getting some use out of convicts. Not if the terms and conditions placed on that kind of slavery strictly limited its use. Such as the use of varying sentences of enslavement for different kinds of crimes.
Sean
"Moreover, most people cannot really imagine any system working which is very different from the one they are used to. Hence they find rationalizations for it. Even slaves often do this.
"I believe that point, made in the present story, touched off a rash of others with the 'daring, iconoclastic' motif that there is something to be said in favor of slavery. My own response was and is profane. Existence does not turn an evil into a good."
— Poul Anderson, 1978 introduction to the reprint of The Long Way Home
David,
Most people cannot imagine any system different from what they are used to. Yet we look back on lives of great change. The Berlin Wall was dismantled. Apartheid was ended. Dictators have been overthrown. Everything is moving and changing all the time but our senses create an illusion of stability and permanence.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID and Paul!
David: And I agree with the views expressed by Poul Anderson in the preface he added to THE LONG WAY HOME, one of his most interesting early novels.
Paul: to imitate Premiere Makarov, from THE AVATAR, "There is a good saying in English, ' the more things change the more they stay the same'." The point I'm making is that I see no change in our flawed, contrary, imperfect human nature.
Tyrants have been overthrown? So what, we still have despots in many nations TODAY. Including grotesque tyrants like Kim Jong Un of N Korea.
Sean
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