"The settlement...bore the marks of the borderlands: earth rampart, log stockade, blockhouses at the corners, and a ditch planted with sharpened stakes. Many from the heartlands of the deep forest would have winced at that, considered the ways of the frontier folk tainted with the un-Circled customs of the outlanders." (Chapter 6, p. 63)
"...deep forest..." does not match our idea of civilization but the outlands-borderlands-heartlands distinction is the same. We have to learn more about the Circle and "'...the New Way...'" (Chapter 5, p. 53).
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Considering how IMPORTANT agriculture and cities were and are in history, that bit about the heartlands of the "deep forest" struck me as very odd. Is a HUMAN civilization even possible without agriculture and cities? High time I reread SNOWBROTHER, to find the answer to that question.
Sean
Sean,
They have some kind of sophisticated society going on in that forest but I have not got very far into it yet. Maybe a bit like Anderson's Freehold: people merging with their environment somehow?
Paul.
OT: Long-term Spaceflight Affects Your Health
https://www.sciencefriday.com/segments/after-a-year-in-space-subtle-but-lingering-changes/
https://www.geekwire.com/2019/full-findings-nasa-twins-study-raise-questions-long-stints-space/
https://www.nasa.gov/twins-study
It has just got to affect it somehow. We have evolved and always lived at the bottom of a gravity well.
Indeed. Some ways seem very problematic, like reducing cognitive faculties, harming vision (more so in men than in women), and increasing the risk of cancer(from GCR, which would be very hard to shield against).
-kh
On this blog, nothing is Off Topic. We are the All Purposes Ad Hoc Sub-Committee, as I used to say when two or three colleagues chatted over coffee at work.
Kaor, Keith!
And Poul Anderson HAS addressed the question of human being adapting to life in space so they could live healthfully off Earth. I had particularly in mind Anderson's THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE, where it was discovered that women could not bear babies thru a full pregnancy due to disrupting effects of the Moon's low gravity on pregnant women.
But, and contrary to the whimpering nay sayers who would rather we simply huddle and cower on Earth, ingenious means were found around that problem. Dagny and Edmond Beynac had their unborn children genetically adapted so that they could live and reproduce healthfully on the Moon (and other low gravity environments). And O'Neill colonies or habitats were built using spin to create an artificial gravity high enough to enable genetically unmodified women to also bear children off Earth.
And in others of his stories, such as the Rustum series, humans adapted as well to living on planets with a gravity significantly higher than Earth's. I see no reason not to believe that can't be done on real planets as well.
Sean
Thanks, Sean. Life will out, and we are one tough form of life!
I thought the sequence in TSTAAF was a bit reversed- I'd think it would be a lot easier to put pregnant women in spin habitats (or have them stay on Terra until they have their babies!) than genegineering a new (metamorph) species.
I don't think we should cower on Terra, but I believe we'll explore space (largely with probes) and not live in it very much:
http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2009/03/solar-system-for-this-century.html
http://www.rocketpunk-manifesto.com/2010/08/in-which-i-bash-space-colonization.html
People travel and have oil rigs on the ocean, but you don't see towns there (like P A's Sea Gypsies or the Maury Station folks). For a very long time, it'll be a lot easier to settle the Gobi Desert or East Antarctica (you can at least breathe the air), but I don't hear people rushing to settle those places...
-kh
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