The Ramnuan Yewwl:
"(Maybe the most baffling and disturbing thing about the star-folk is the way they submit their wills, their fates, to the will of others, whom they may never even have met. That is, if I have discerned what Banner has tried over the years to explain to me. Sometimes I have hoped that I am mistaken about this.)" (p. 135)
The Ythrian, Hloch of the Stormgate Choth on Avalon:
"To explain the concept 'nation' is stiffly upwind."
-Poul Anderson, The Earth Book Of Stormgate (New York, 1969), p. 23.
Lemuel Gulliver contrasted European with Brobdignanian economics. In the latter, provinces with food surpluses send the surpluses to provinces with shortages. (I write from memory but that is the gist of it.) (Jonathan Swift's islands were like other planets.)
Olaf Stapledon commented on humanity by changing its context. Human beings artificially but hastily adapted to live on Neptune revert to animality but retain puzzling features of human behavior:
grazers suffering hardship gather and ululate cacophonously or sit and listen to a howling leader, then groan, whimper and foam;
some carnivora withdraw from activity to sit alone, watch and wait until forced back to action by hunger...
Ramnuans, Ythrians, Brobdignagians and Neptunations are both speculative alien species and vehicles for commenting on humanity.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Another way of putting it is that here we see Anderson using his preferred libertarian inclinations to shape how Ramnuans might react to strange political concepts. Fortunately, not all the different kinds of non-humans Anderson speculated about come across to me as naive as the Ramnuans seem here to be.
After all, simply by setting up the Lords of the Volcano the Ramnuans themselves were groping their way to developing socio/political institutions larger than the clan.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I liked the way I was able to tie in Anderson with Swift and Stapledon.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I noticed that! And Swift's GULLIVER'S TRAVELS is yet another of the many books I should reread. I also have a copy of Asimov's ANNOTATED GULLIVER'S TRAVELS.
I don't find myself buying as many new books as I used to do. Rather, I tend now to reread books I got years ago and might have read only once. There are some exceptions, such as new books by S.M. Stirling.
Ad astra! Sean
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