When Captain Flandry wakes in a cell in a non-human spaceship, sf genre cliches abound:
hyperspace;
humanoid aliens;
interstellar politics that are merely a continuation of international politics.
I do not expect the future or the galaxy to be anything like that but certain conventions became standardized in pulp sf. Stories set in different series are virtually interchangeable. "Tiger By The Tail" could easily be adapted as a Star Trek episode although there are some differences. First, Flandry, prisoner, is naked which would not usually happen on screen. Secondly, the clues informing him that his captors are not human are mostly too subtle to be shown on screen:
the air is breathable but chilly with peculiar odours and denser than Terran;
the artificial gravity is stronger than Terran;
sheets are of vegetable fibre;
blankets are of blue-gray hair;
a wooden chest is carved in a style unfamiliar to Flandry.
The guard outside the door is very white and horned with pointed, convoluted, mobile ears. Star Trek make-up would be able to cope with that although often screen aliens are indistinguishable from Terrestrials, which does not happen in the Technic History:
"Among countless worlds, evolutionary coincidences are bound to happen now and then, but never evolutionary identities." (p. 242)
Nevertheless, the coincidences are too frequent for my liking.
Poul Anderson wrote both space opera and serious speculative fiction and even incorporated these two kinds of writing into a single future history series. In his much later novel, Genesis, post-organic intelligences, travelling at sub-light speeds, explore a mostly lifeless galaxy, a far cry from the Technic History.
9 comments:
The Scothiani have only recently and incompletely been "modernized".
This has close analogies on Earth in the last few centuries.
For example, in WWII, Japan had built first-rate fighter aircraft, and some of the largest and most sophisticated warships on Earth.
But her military officers still carried (and sometimes used) katana-swords, and the bulk of the Japanese population were still peasants cultivating rice-paddies, mostly by hand.
The soldiers wore Western-style uniforms, but fundoshi-loincloths underneath them, which is sort of illustrative.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: I don't share your optimism! Politics is about the managing of conflicts and the public business of a society/nation. I fully expect human beings to engage in politics, including the kinds you don't like, once mankind gets off this rock. First on a merely interplanetary scale, withing the Solar System, and then on an interstellar scale if a FTL drive is ever invented.
Mr. Stirling: And given modern military technology, swords are mostly useless. The US Army, and other Western armies, retain them only for ceremonial occasions.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
What I meant was that I don't expect FTL or planets full of humanoid beings sufficiently similar to us for either war or trade to happen. I expect the unexpected.
Paul.
"sufficiently similar to us for either war or trade to happen."
I think some really dissimilar species could come into conflict. Suppose one species tries to 'terraform' a world to make it better for it to live on which makes it worse for another species which wants it?
Kaor, Paul and Jim!
Paul: I suspect you might well be wrong. MY view is that if two intelligent species have BIOCHEMISTRIES enough like each other that they can desire the same kinds of planets, that alone opens the door for conflicts between them. And such races don't even have to look much like each other!
Jim: I have my doubts about the scenario you proposed. I don't think that would happen unless one species or the other had already staked a claim to that planet.
Ad astra! Sean
Japanese officers still carried swords in 1941... but officers in Western armies still wore them into action in 1914.
Japan didn't really participate in 1914-18, not on land on any scale.
Little things like that illustrated this. The Japanese diligently studied WW1 and learned many lessons from it -- their infantry tactics in WWII were quite good and gave us many nasty surprises.
But observing is not quite the same thing as participating.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, hard actual experience is the best way to learn.
But, I thought the Japanese of WW II were also known for kamikaze, mass suicide charges. But that might have belonged more to late in the war, when Japan was losing and increasingly DESPERATE.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, it did. They didn't surrender. Many armies talk about 'fighting to the death', but the Japanese were one that actually did it. Romans often did too.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And most times I would disagree with such grand talk of "fighting to the death" if it won't do your country or cause any GOOD. At the very least a defeated army should retreat, if possible, to fight again another day.
Also, signatories to the Hague and Geneva conventions bound themselves to treat with reasonable decency soldiers captured from enemy armies in times of war.
Ad astra! Sean
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