"North America, Europe, parts of Asia and South America, fewer parts of Africa, hit bottom because they were overextended. Let the industrial-agricultural-medical complexes they had built be paralyzed for the shortest whiles, and people would begin dying by millions. The scramble of survivors for survival would bring everything else down in wreck." (p. 75)
We have enjoyed sitting comfortably at home while reading about fictional heroes in danger of their lives and even about the deaths of millions in future catastrophes. Now I am persuaded that the paragraph quoted above might describe our immediate future.
Wallis tells Havig:
"'By now we've hundreds of agents, plus thousands of devoted commoners.'" (p. 76)
Does he mean temporal agents? That sounds like a lot after the difficulties he has had with recruitment. But we will read on and learn how big the Eyrie is.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I also thought of the near immediate catastrophe of the Change in Stirling's Emberverse books. That brought EVERYTHING crashing down at once!
Those commoners Wallis mentioned must have included the ordinary, non-time traveling residents of the territories ruled by the Eyrie. I can see why they would be devoted if Walls and his chief agents restored order in those lands and enabled them to simply LIVE with hope of providing for themselves and their children.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: It's a matter of context and comparison. People wouldn't react to the Eyrie the way we would; they'd react to it by comparison with their circumstances before and prospects without the Eyrie.
NB: in my research for the Change series, it was driven home to me how very few areas of the world are genuinely independent of the integrated world-machine we've built.
Eg., half the population of Nigeria lives in cities, mostly fed on imported food paid for with petroleum exports.
And it's not just the urbanites. There are vastly more -peasants- in Africa than there were 100 years ago, when much of it was genuinely isolated from anywhere beyond a few days journey.
Eg., in the Kenya highlands there are 30X as many people as there were 100 years ago. Remove the modern world and the cities, and it would probably crash back to about that level.
The only people who wouldn't be drastically affected would be some very, very remote populations of no great size -- some of the Ituri pygmies, for instance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Re the Eyrie: I agree. You and I simply cannot react to Wallis and his men the way those desperate, harried farmers did. They were GRATEFUL because he brought order and predictability back to their lives.
Again, I agree. The world wide global civilization and "machine" we have is now crucial for the survival of virtually everybody. If it crashes, everybody goes down with it. Except maybe a few isolated Amazon tribes--and those Ituri pygmies you mentioned.
All the more REASON we should hope people like Elon Musk succeed in getting us off this rock! Doing so would increase our options. And widen and deepen our resource base.
Ad astra! Sean
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