"Abrams could spot individual differences between nonhumans as easily as with his own species. That was part of his business. An untrained eye saw merely the alienness." (p. 14)
This is where it is stated that Merseians are true mammals.
On p. 18, Abrams remembers his home planet, Dayan:
gaunt hills;
wind-scoured plains;
warm orange sunlight;
low trees;
salt marshes;
pride in the successful colonization of a desolate planet.
On Starkad, spaceships in port are like:
"...steel cenotaphs rearing athwart the Milky Way." (p. 19)
Abrams makes a mistake but immediately takes the trouble to correct it and this pays off.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I remember there was a discussion somewhere, either in one of Anderson's stories or in the combox, on whether words like "mammalian" could accurately be applied to non-Terrestrial forms of life, even if some shared the characteristics typical of Earthly mammals. I fully expect arguments among our scientists on how best to describe extraterrestrial life forms--if they are ever discovered on other worlds.
I remember that mistake Abrams made, and how fateful his corrective action was!
Ad astra! Sean
“Group X all look alike” merely means “I haven’t been exposed to Group X a lot”.
This is related to the fact that people don’t “see” the way there think they do — your visual system is not like a camera. What you “see” internally is a composite of stored information with the visual clues you’re getting at any given moment.
The less familiar something is, the harder it is to visually comprehend. A truly unfamiliar object is difficult to process visually — it often ‘makes no sense’ on first exposure.
Recognizing other people and their attributes works on this basis too.
Eg., in a culture with very strong conventions on what the sexes wear, people use that as a visual clue; it’s easy to ‘pass’ for a member of the other gender. Our great-grandparents were in that situation, and photographs of people who successfully ‘passed’ now often look laughably obvious to us, because we’re in an environment where dress is often very similar or identical and you need to notice much more subtle anatomical clues.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! And that has happened to me. I mean there has been times when I needed a few seconds to "see" something. That is, for my mind to make sense of what the eye saw.
Ad astra! Sean
The same -effect- can have different biological origins and causes.
Eg., both mammals and birds (aka “dinosaurs”) are warm-blooded, but evolved the facility separately, long after their evolutionary divergence, and do it rather differently.
Back before the asteroid, many of the larger dinosaurs seem to have been warm-blooded when they were young (and hence small) but to have shifted to a thermal-intertia model when they reached adulthood. This explains why they could be so very large.
The upper limit for a land mammal is about 14 tons; above that, they would cook — quite literally “stew in their own juice”.
Likewise, some reptiles have evolved a capacity to incubate and hatch their eggs within their bodies, but thought this accomplishes the same thing as the system placental mammals use, it’s not related.
Incidentally, the autocorrect function here is bizarre and obtrusive — “autocorrect is our enema”, as the saying goes.
I believe that the first audience who went into a theater and were shown a short cartoon film of a dinosaur came out not knowing what they had seen.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you again for all these informative comments.
Paul.
In Doris Egan's Two-Bit Heroes, narrator Theodora is bewildered when a group of outlaws she's fallen in with keep commenting on her strong resemblance to another young offworlder, Cantry. Theo is certain there's no likeness aside from the fact that they are young women of about the same height; for one thing, Cantry is blonde and Theo's hair is auburn. But these are people who know Cantry well, and they tell Theodora, "You could be twins." She finally realizes that since all the locals have dark hair and eyes, hair and eye colors are not at all among the things they consider when looking for points of recognition, so they'd completely missed the difference between blonde and auburn.
One of my brothers who taught at a rural school in Kenya said it was only after he’d been there for a month that he realized how dependent he’d been on things like hair and eye color to tell strangers apart....
Post a Comment