"...the oldest colonists...had become very few." (p. 87)
In my childhood, World War II was a recent event and there were many veterans of World War I. In the late 1960s, then the 1970s, I worked alongside guys who had been in WWII and had been demobbed afterwards. In the 1990s, a pensioner talked about his wartime experiences in Italy, meeting Catholic and Communist partisans. Now all the WWI vets are dead and how many are left from WWII? Anyone who was twenty in 1945 is ninety-seven now.
We quickly pass by sentences like "They had become very few" but it is worthwhile to pause and reflect on what that means for the people concerned. Most of the characters that we read about in the early installments of the Rustum History, like Theron Wolfe and Joshua Coffin, have died by now and Rustum is changing as its population grows and spreads into the lowlands. A history unfolds on Rustum as on Earth.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm reminded of how one of the very last pictures to be taken of Hitler, during the last weeks of WW II, was of him meeting some of the BOY soldiers a desperate Germany threw into the struggle against the UK/US and the USSR. By 1945 there were some veterans who were only 13, 14, or 15 years old. But, even they, if any are still alive, would be in their nineties by now.
Ad astra! Sean
It's historically valuable to remember that the span of a lifetime is a long time regardless of era -- this is a corrective to the tendency to telescope time as you look backwards.
Eg., I'm now writing a book set in the 1920's, albeit an alternate one. And I keep in mind that to the characters, the 19th century is like the 20th to us -- they talk about "the 60's", and they mean the Civil War era. The President was born in 1858 and remembers seeing Lincoln's funeral cortege passing through New York... equivalent to someone younger than I. The protagonist was born in the early 1890's -- equivalent to a Millennial; her partner is a borderline GenX'er.
And past centuries can have just as much change as ours.
In fact, the US of 1920 is more different from that of 1820 than that of 1920 is from 2020.
In 1820, the overwhelming majority of US citizens lived on the east coast; everything west of the Mississippi was Indian Country (except for some small Spanish/Mexican outposts), and so were chunks of the Midwest and the South; there were 50 million buffalo on the Great Plains.
My grandfather was gassed at Ypres in 1917 and my grandmother was bombed by Zeppelins in London; my grandfather's grandfather, according to family legend, fought in the Second Afghan War. My father fought in the Second World War from 1939-45, and wouldn't have met my mother without it -- he originally planned to go into the Colonial Service.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree with how you said we should regard fairly long lifespans, such as that of Theodore Roosevelt.
Alas, my family history is nowhere as dramatic as yours! My paternal grandfather did service in the US Army and then became a policeman. Hi son, my father, was a politician for a time in MA, did non combatant service in the US Navy in WW II, and joined the board of assessors for my hometown. My maternal grandfather was a landowner in New Jersey and owned a moving and storage business in New York City.
If circumstances had been different, your father might have become an administrator for the British Empire! I recall how Ian Fleming had nothing but respect for most administrators of that kind in his Bond books.
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Paul!
Until rather recently, two living veterans of World War Two were friends of mine; Professor Mason Gaffney died in 2020, and Walter Rybeck died last year; I got to know both of them through the Georgist movement. My maternal grandfather was also a veteran of the Second World War, and he died in 1997, aged eighty-eight. By the way, he served in the French Army, to which he had duly reported when called up as a reserve officer, although he was living in the United States with his American wife and their daughter, my mother to be, and could have stayed there. After the Fall of France, he escaped from German captivity, made his way to the Vichy zone, and, after further adventures, joined his family in the United States.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Kaor, Nicholas!
I'm glad your grandfather survived!
Regards! Sean
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