In SM Stirling's Shadows Of Annihilation, when it is published next March, look out for:
in Chapter SIX, a list-description of an indoor market;
near the end of Chapter SEVEN, a dramatic pathetic fallacy - a threat followed immediately by thunder and rain;
in Chapters SIX and EIGHT, much information about the practice of Catholicism in Mexico;
in Chapter EIGHT, another oblique alternative historical comment on "our"/real history - Roosevelt had:
"...quashed the Prohibition movement for alcohol because he thought it was stupid or unworkable or both..." (p. 164) (Comment: both);
near the end of Chapter EIGHT, mythological references to Artemis, a dryad and Queen Maeve.
Sorry that I can't fit in more. This blog approves of rich texts.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Altho "indoor" markets seem to be declining somewhat, due to competition with online shopping via computers, we still have them, called "malls." Altho I bet that word is not used in SHADOWS.
I would not be surprised if Chapters Six and Eight makes some mention of the strong veneration Mexican Catholics have for the apparition of the BVM at Guadalupe.
The Church in what was once Mexico might very well be placed in a delicate position due to the conquest by the US. Due to a certain tension between Mexican patriotism and the need for an at least public neutrality in politics.
And I would absolutely agree with that alternate Teddy Roosevelt's low opinion of the IDIOTIC Prohibition movement! Trying to ban alcoholic drinks was both stupid and unworkable--AND stimulated the rise and growth of organized crime on a large scale.
Ad astra! Sean
TR despised drunkards -- his elder brother died of alcoholism -- and was very abstementious himself, not quite a teetotaler but a very light social drinker. And he didn't smoke and hated tobacco, too; he was a fitness fanatic, after all.
But he thought the Prohibitionists had no sense of what was politically and administratively feasible.
TR had an acute sense that politics was "the art of the possible". He could be very bold indeed, but always with a consciousness that the wish is not the thing.
Probably starting out at the nitty-gritty level of politics -- ward organizing, State representative, convention delegate, Police Commissioner, civil-service reformer, Assistant Secretary of the Navy -- kept him grounded. It also accustomed him to mixing with and talking honestly and openly with men of all conditions of life -- he hd the "common touch", and in spades.
In the Black Chamber history, TR sees that the Protectorate administration is scrupulously polite and deferential to the Catholic Church in Mexico, and that American Catholics are prominent in the administration.
It helps that the Mexican revolutionaries were violently anticlerical in the 19th-century Latin tradition, and also that while TR thought highly of religion (he taught Sunday School and always attended services regularly) he was more or less a deist in his personal theology and profoundly indifferent to doctrinal differences -- utterly without religious prejudices, tool.
(In this he deliberately followed George Washington's example.)
In his book "The Rough Riders", he goes out of his way to mention and praise Catholic and Jewish soldiers and officers (the latter included some New Mexican Hispanic grandees) and to predict that there would be Catholic and Jewish Presidents in the new century.
He was the first American President to appoint a Jewish cabinet member, btw.
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