The first anachronism in Poul Anderson's "The Only Game In Town" is John Sandoval's appearance. Everard thinks that Sandoval's face looks as if it should be wearing warpaint, not looking out of a window in mid-twentieth century Manhattan. Sandoval has told Everard that the Chinese discovered America. This could be just a new historical finding. However, Sandoval is standing on a polar bear rug that
Bjarni Herjulfsson, the Norse discoverer of America, gave to Everard so time travel is involved. We know this already but we are checking to see how and when the time travel aspect is first made explicit in this story which was originally published in a magazine.
"Towers were sharp against a clear sky; the noise of traffic was muted by height."
-Poul Anderson, "The Only Game In Town" IN Anderson,
The Guardians Of Time (New York, 1981), pp. 141-185 AT
1, p. 141.
Thus, the twentieth century scenery is allowed to impinge before the conversation continues. Sandoval has seen Mongols with horses in North America in 1280 A.D. It happened centuries ago but it is a situation that the Time Patrol must address
now.
6 comments:
This is where time travel plots make your head hurt.
My assumption with that story was that whether anything history-changing would -come- of the Mongol expedition (which was technically perfectly possible, btw. -- native Alaskans and Siberians were in sporadic contact at the time) depends on the actions of the two agents.
The relevant actions are "ahead" in terms of the world-lines of Manse and his friend, so they don't "actuate" until they've undergone them.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
"The Only Game in Town" has made wondered what might have happened for real if the Chinese and Mongols of Kubilai Khan's time HAD discovered American
And what might have happened, to suggest a different scenario, if the tentative Norse settlement in "Vinland" had survived and not been destroyed? I can see some of the Indian tribes and sachems quickly learning from Europeans who were not yet so advanced in technology that the Indians simply could not catch up with the the new settlers. Mixed Euro/Indian nations, city states, and kingdoms trading back and forth with Europe? Complete with American princesses marrying into European royal houses and vice versa?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Was this one of the timelines in "Eutopia"?
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, it was! And I've just now thought of the situation seen in "Delenda Est" as well. and possibly in "The House of Sorrows."
Ad astra! Sean
The biggest threat to the Amerindians from contact with the Old World -- at least, sustained and frequent contact -- was disease. This wasn't as well understood when Poul began writing the Time Patrol series.
As soon as Eurasians or Africans began regular contact, waves of virgin-field epidemics were going to hit the New World, whose inhabitants were triply vulnerable: they didn't have acquired immunity from previous contacts in their own lifetimes, they hadn't undergone genetic culling by epidemics in previous centuries, and their small founder populations had left them with little genetic diversity, which makes epidemics worse because pathogens adapt to their host, and thereby become more virulent in a uniform group.
Once that process started, the population of the Americas was going to drop by 90%. That was inevitable.
The main variables in the process were how large the original populations were, because a small percentage of a very large number is still a pretty large number, and how many Europeans (or Africans, in some areas) crowded in to occupy the vacated niche before the remnants could breed back.
Mexico had around 15-20 million people when Cortez arrived in the early 1500's; by the mid 1600's, there were about 1.5 million people in that territory, and less than a million of them were purebred Indians: the rest were of European, African and mixed background. Today the Mexican population is roughly 2/3 European by genetic background, with regional variations.
That's not because of mass migration -- Spanish migration to their American colonies rarely exceeded a couple of thousands a year, and it was predominantly male.
It's because of differential reproductive success: outside the tropical zones (which became dangerous because of _African_ diseases) Europeans had a genetic advantage because of greater disease resistance, and so did their children whether or not of mixed blood; and because of their social position as conquerors, they had access to more women, and to more food and other resources, and so did their children.
The English generally expelled or wiped out the survivors of the plagues in their American colonies, and totally replaced them with European or African migrants. The Spanish usually didn't (with some exceptions in the Caribbean and elsewhere), and the French and Portuguese were in between.
A Time Patrolman notes this in one of the stories -- he's a Peruvian of Incan descent himself.
Without the disease environment that favored them (and a lot of their plants and animals) the European conquest of the Americas would have been more like their experience in Africa and Asia.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And it was because of your comments here and in works of yours like CONQUISTADOR that I became more aware of how disease played such a huge role in the European conquest of the Americas.
I do recall William Prescott laying some stress in the HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO of how an accidentally introduced disease like smallpox DEVASTATED the Aztecs. So there was some sporadic awareness of the role played by disease in history.
So, disease, then the introduction of new plants for crops and animals were the primary reasons for the success of the European conquest in the Americas.
Ad astra! Sean
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