Conan Doyle evokes Victorian London, then presents the details of a new Sherlock Holmes case. Isaac Asimov's Black Widowers conduct an entertaining casual conversation before they hear the details of a specific problem. Poul Anderson's Manse Everard explores Amsterdam and has an interesting general conversation with Janne Floris before she focuses on the details:
"'You are certainly aware that both the Annals and the Histories came down to later centuries incomplete.'" (p. 484)
I want the narratives and dialogues to remain general for longer.
We use words to discuss the logic of causality violation paradoxes but cannot use mathematics to discuss the physics of time travel:
"'You see, that particular milieu is critical. Mr. Gordon showed me the analysis. I couldn't follow all those symbols, but he said it was a very dangerous century to tamper with.'
"Everard closed one large hand on the bowl of his pipe. Its warmth was somehow comforting. Critical eras gave him the willies."
-Poul Anderson, "Brave To Be A King" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 55-112 AT 2, pp. 62-63.
One era is more critical than others because more crucial events happen in it. Everard says of the Jewish War, 69-70 A.D.:
"'...the situation itself, the near-infinity of causes radiating into that episode and effects radiating out from it....I don't pretend to understand the physics, but I sure can believe what I've been taught, that the continuum is especially vulnerable around such moments. As far away as barbarian Germany, reality is unstable.'
"'But what could have shifted it?'
"'That's what we've got to find out...'" (p. 492)
Something has shifted an unstable reality near a moment when the continuum is vulnerable albeit in a different location. We just have to take their word for this. Later on this mission, Everard has access to:
"The histories, the data files, the great coordinating computers, the experts of the Time Patrol. The knowledge that this is the proper configuration of a plenum that has powerful negative feedback. We've identified the random factor that could bring on an avalanching change; what we must do is damp it." (16, pp. 607-608)
That negative feedback is helpful. The Patrol changes one event and others change accordingly.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
JRR Tolkien would probably have sympathized with your wish for "...for narratives and dialogues to remain general for longer." His Appendices for THE LORD OFT RINGS obviously includes a huge amount of material he probably wished he could have included in the main text of that story. Which he did not do because that would have intolerably slowed down the action of the epic.
Yes, the works of Tacitus, esp. his ANNALS and HISTORIES, unfortunately survived only in incomplete forms. I've seen speculation that his works survived only because the Emperor Tacitus (r. 275-76), who claimed descent from the historian, had those works copied. And parts of those copies were copied in turn.
Ad astra! Sean
Ad astra! Sean
Oh to have had the printing press invented sometime before about 200 AD.
Kaor, Jim!
An intriguing thought! A much earlier invention of mechanical printing would indeed have had incalcuable consequences. But that leads me to wondering if the means and knowledge for that kind of technology existed or could have existed in AD 200.
Ad astra! Sean
ISTR that something about the differences between paper & papyrus would make printing on the later impractical, even if there were not other problems.
IIRC paper had been invented in China by that time, but it only got introduced to the Muslim Caliphate in about the 8th century AD & it took a few more centuries for the techniques to get learned by Europeans.
Apparently after Gutenberg devised his press it spread quickly through Europe, but not into the Muslim world, partly because being largely one big empire (Ottoman) suppressing it was easier there, & partly because the reverence for calligraphy made for more cultural resistance.
If paper had been known by the people of the Roman Empire, perhaps printing could have been adopted. I would not expect any cultural resistance.
Publishing was a fairly substantial industry in the Roman Empire, because literacy was (by the standards of the ancient world) very widespread, and because there was a brisk demand for a "canon" of literature, which was at the heart of the middle-to-upper class education. Every educated man was expected to have read it, and to draw on it for rhetorical purposes.
But texts were quite expensive; the bottleneck was the hand-copying process.
Paper of the pre-19th century type, made from old rags, would have been perfectly possible -- and a much more widespread industry than papyrus, for which demand was steady and large but whose supply was limited and confined to workshops in Egypt.
The equipment isn't complex; it's one of those things like stirrups, that could have been made much earlier if only someone had had the idea. It's basically a refinement of the process for making felt.
If someone had come up with both in the 1st century, I'd expect them to spread like wildfire. Technologies did in that period, as huge areas of the Empire were brought up to Italian/Mediterranean standards.
Kaor, Jim!
I cannot better Stirling's comments above, aside from being surprised that mechanical printing might have been invented by or before AD 200. Or that pre-19th century style paper could also have been developed around that time as well.
I would point out to Stirling that papyrus was exported from Egypt, even if supplies were limited. In fact I've read that the Papal chancery used papyrus for official documents down to about 1000 or 1100.
I have a vague recollection of reading that printing was resisted in the Muslim world. And that it was forbidden to print the Koran until the 1790's.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, there was no significant printing in the Muslim areas until then -- except among Jews and Christians living in the Muslim-ruled areas. The ulema/scribal guild kept too tight a grip on power.
It's interesting that despite being a "religion of the Book" literacy was very low in Muslim areas, usually under 2%.
Whereas Jews at that time were mostly literate. Christians were sort of in between, with wide variability between regions and periods.
NB: papyrus was a major Egyptian export from the Hellenistic period on, but its expense was a bottleneck.
Note that papermaking as a -concept- travelled west from China, where it was first invented, but the actual technique used further west was quite different.
Chinese and East Asian papermaking generally used fiber from the interior bark of certain plants (abaca, kozo and hem), which was "cooked" and pounded before being hand-layered. In some areas of SE Asia, the materials were fed to elephants and the fiber washed out of their dung.
Middle Eastern and European papermaking was derived from that system, but used boiled and (mechanically) pounded fiber from woolen and (more commonly) linen rags, later cotton rags.
The pulp was stirred, heated, and then "extracted" from vats by using wire screens in wooden frames; the screens were passed through the pulp until enough was collected, whereupon they were pressed in layers in a screw-press, trimmed, and then hung to dry.
As I mentioned, this is a refinement of longstanding techniques for making felt.
(There are a lot of details beside that -- clay of a special type has to be added to the paper to "size" it, that is make it suitable for inking.)
Mechanical printing is an extension of seal-stamping -- the principle is exactly the same, the difference being that the carved surface is inked rather than being pressed into wax.
Mesopotamians had, since early in the Bronze Age, used "roller seals", which had pictures and text on a cylinder, which was then rolled onto the damp clay also used for writing-tablets.
It's basically a conceptual extension of those techniques: you just have to think "what if I could stamp a seal on paper, rather than wax" and then after that works add "and I could have a lot of seals making up words".
S. M. Stirling
I expect you read up on paper making techniques to determine how hard it would be for your time displaced Nantucketers to build up a paper making industry.
BTW I wonder if this would have been useful for those same Nantucketers
http://www.h2proped.com/
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Jim!
Mr. Stirling: Your comments here were so interesting I read them three or four times.
Yes, based on what I have read about Muslim history, I can see the Ulema/scribal guilds resisting both printing and wider literacy. It would tighten their grip on power.
Before papermaking was mastered and improved on by Europeans, only papyrus and vellum were practical writing materials, and both had their faults.
Jim: I'm sure the Nantucketers in Stirling's ISLAND IN THE SEA OF TIME books could find the knowledge of how to make printing presses. They just needed to find the time and resources needed for making them.
Ad astra! Sean
Exactly. For story purposes Stirling needed to know if the necessary time & resources would be small enough for a town of a few thousand to do the job.
Kaor, Jim!
And the Nantucketers probably had some working pre-Event presses that would do till they had the time needed for learning how to make new ones.
Ad astra! Sean
Jim: I've researched it for several projects.
The Nantucketers would probably use a refinement of the early-19th century continuous process; it's not very complex and can be scaled up or down easily.
The transition of papermaking from east to west illustrates two things: the Chinese were extremely ingenious, and West Europeans used inanimate power sources earlier and in a more widespread fashion than others.
The Romans knew about watermills, for example: but in 1086 England alone seems to have had more than the whole of the Roman Empire at its height (4-5 thousand). And they were used for more diverse purposes, like breaking flax and scutching cloth, and papermaking when that came in.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And wasn't that largely due to the ubiquitous use of slaves making labor so cheap there wasn't much motive for Romans to develop labor saving machinery?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: not really.
Slave labor wasn't actually very cheap. Its overall costs (counting things like supervisory overhead) were roughly similar to that of free labor.
The main advantage was flexibility/control
There were severe constraints on the availability and reliability of wage labor in Rome, even though it was quite widespread by the late Republic. Free Romans were very unwilling to put themselves in a situation where their labor was -routinely- under the control of another. They wouldn't work as domestic servants at all, for example; and they wouldn't accept what we'd call responsible managerial jobs if it involved being under another's supervision long-term.
Slaves didn't have that drawback, so they could be used for time-sensitive agricultural tasks, or shifted about, or forced to adopt new organizations and methods.
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