"The giant followed wordlessly, and said nothing when the small heap of handbags was pointed out to him - merely picked them up and trudged bade." (p. 156)
Bade?
"The giant followed wordlessly, and said nothing when the small heap of handbags was pointed out to him - merely picked them up and trudged back."
-Poul Anderson, The Snows of Ganymede (New York, 1958), CHAPTER 4, p. 24.
Back! This time, the earlier edition gives us the correct spelling.
That "giant" is:
grey-clad;
hairless;
gigantic;
four-armed;
with an inhumanly vacant face;
introduced as "'Porter...'" (ibid.)
Genetic engineering not enhancing but debasing. We see this also in Anderson's Kith future history.
25 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And I am not in the least surprised by this debasing. Some humans will always behave like that if and when the chance comes.
Ad astra! Sean
But would anyone consider the debasing worth the trouble?
In "Brave New World" there is an early scene in which a very low caste human has barely the intelligence to run an elevator. A few decades after that was written we had automation so people just push a button & the elevator goes to the desired floor & puts the floor of the elevator level with the floor of the building. Much cheaper than keeping an epsilon class human fed & housed.
Economics may preclude producing debased humans for any task.
Likewise, a combine harvester for wheat is cheaper than human labor even at a bare biological minimum level.
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Both: I agree economic practicalities might deter even nasty people from perpetrating the genetic debasing of humans that we see in "The Snows of Ganymede" and BRAVE NEW WORLD. Except, I can still tyrants doing this debasing for reasons of swank.
Mr. Stirling: I recall as well how, in your Emberverse books, the theosophist Church Universal and Triumphant had a program breeding humans to be stupid, even lower than slaves, mere animals fit for nothing except for farm work.
Yes, I know that was after the Change, when technology higher water power stopped WORKING, the survivors had to go back to using a lot more muscle power.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: although there's muscle and muscle.
Eg., a horse-drawn reaper-binder lets 1 human and 4 horses do the same work in a day as around 140-180 humans with sickles, counting the people binding the sheaves.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, I did have that in my mind as well, that some 1860's technology remained usable in your Change books.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: more like 1920's technology, in agricultural terms. Up until then, combustion engines had made only marginal differences.
The last generation of horse-powered equipment was as far in advance of what had been around in the early 1800's as today's stuff is of the 1920's.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
AND would probably be very useful for the first generations of colonists on terrestroid planets.
Ad astra! Sean
Here is something I wrote in 2007 about some anachronistic possibilities we get as petroleum gets scarce.
We can get all the electricity we need from nuclear fission even if nothing else works, but running mobile machinery like cars will be more difficult as oil gets scarce & expensive. It could turn out that we don't get batteries much better than the current best & alternatives to oil for liquid fuels are either very expensive or can't be scaled up to anywhere near the level that we currently use petroleum.
So given that premise, we get a world in which long distance transport is mostly by electric railway (possibly maglev) & nuclear ships. Air transport becomes much smaller, done only when it's worth paying exorbitant prices. Some short distance transport can be done by battery powered vehicles, though bicycle & walking would replace a lot of car use.
I suspect farm tractors & bulldozers etc. would be powered by batteries that get switched for recharged batteries after a few hours work. But would a shift to horse drawn machinery be worth doing for some purposes?
Doing something similar for cars would require a network of battery recharge stations larger than the current network of gasoline stations since the range of battery cars is shorter before recharge than gasoline cars before refill.
This leaves large land areas beyond the net of electric rail & battery recharge stations in which travel would revert to muscle power: walking, horse, camel, llama, dog or reindeer sled, & canoe. Travelers in these regions could carry light weight electronic gear like satellite phones & GPS receivers, & their other gear would be made of modern light & strong materials, but they would move at pre-industrial speeds.
We get a similar situation on any colony world in which petroleum is either rare or has not yet been found & developed.
Jim: but petroleum never did get scarce.
Officially listed 'reserves' (that is, accessible to current technology) are larger now than they were in the 1970's, despite unprecedented consumption in the interim.
We're obviously going to stop using petroleum and coal as fuels long, long before we physically run short of them.
Eg., Botswana alone turns out to have 217 -billion- tons of available coal, once people really started looking.
When I first read economic geography texts, they said Mozambique had 'a little' coal. It now lists 25 billion tons of reserves!
Tanzania turns out to have really major offshore natural gas fields.
And so forth and so on. Exploration and improved technology usually keep ahead of consumption -- and if there's a temporary imbalance, prices rise... which spurs development of new resources.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree. And I also believe it's tine to move on from fossil fuels. The problem being how bungling politicians and ignorant Luddite hysteria gets in the way of us getting serious about the only practical alternative to fossil fuels, nuclear power.
Ad astra! Sean
Yes, it is the limited capacity of the atmosphere & ocean to harmlessly absorb CO2 that is the problem. The quantity of fossil fuel is finite but much larger than the capacity of the environment to absorb CO2.
However, the problem is that CO2 in the air is an externality that doesn't get paid by whoever does the emitting of CO2 into the air, so no one goes to much effort to limit their own emissions.
I understand that the entire oceans *could* harmlessly absorb much more CO2 than has been emitted, but it takes thousands of years for ocean circulation to result in all the CO2 being absorbed.
Kaor, Jim!
Another big problem is how China and India, the two single largest CO2 polluters in the world, have made it blindingly obvious that they don't care about the pollution caused by their insensately gluttonous passion for brown coal. And exporters of coal, like Botswana, also don't care.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But we can at least change our policies and set an example to others. Merely blaming those others doesn't solve anything.
Paul.
Paul: nor does setting an example that other people ignore.
It's important not to project yourself (or your own culture) onto others.
Eg., China now has new coal power plants under construction that exceed the -entire- coal-fired generating capacity of the US. They're also explicitly planning on increasing domestic coal production more than the entire US annual production over the next 4 years.
And they're already producing more than 50% of all the -new- CO2 entering the atmosphere.
This renders anything we do mere virtue-signalling.
Oh, and Botswana is building a series of large new coal-fired power stations.
Nobody will consent to become poor or remain poor in order to avoid burning coal and oil.
That's just not human nature.
The figures are alarming. We can only pressurize our own governments and support such movements elsewhere.
Kaor, Paul!
Hark! I seem to hear ROARS OF DERISIVE LAUGHTER from China, India, Botswana, etc. Because that is exactly how they will regard nonsense about "setting an example."
And the only kind of "pressure" from other nations that might force the nations I listed to stop their CO2 pollution is military force. I do not expect the US or UK to go to war with
China or India just because they use so much coal. BE REALISTIC.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Laughter no doubt but it is hardly a laughing matter. The scientific prediction is an imminent irreversible ecological catastrophe. That can motivate the populations of other countries to take action against their governments.
In our lifetimes, the Soviet Union has collapsed, the Berlin Wall has been torn down and Apartheid has been overthrown. Change is happening. We can try to make it for the better instead of for the worse but that takes effort. Merely maintaining the status quo is a disastrous option.
Paul.
Paul: people will not pressure their governments to reduce their incomes.
Quite the contrary.
The Soviet Union lost popular legitimacy largely because its population became demoralizingly conscious of how the Soviet regime -- which had always claimed to be economically superior and more efficient -- was underperforming vs. a vs. the Western countries.
"They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work," as the Russian saying went.
In other words, the populations wanted what we have.
The American labor leader Samuel Gompers was asked in the 1890's what the American working class wanted.
He replied:
"More. We want more. And when it becomes more we shall still want more. And we shall never cease to demand more."
As for the long run, most people instinctively go by Keynes saying -- "In the long run, we are all dead."
Which is why any "environmentalist" proposal based on a Puritanical distaste for appetite is doomed, by the way.
If you want to sell something, you have to credibly promise -more- satisfaction, not less.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you for all these contributions, by the way.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Besides what Stirling said, which I agree with, I'll only add that that the rulers of China, India, Botswana, etc., DON'T CARE about that "irreversible ecological catastrophe." And many, many ordinary people in those countries also don't care. So forget about any kind of EFFECTIVE action against those gov'ts.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But is there an irreversible ecological catastrophe and what should be done about it? People certainly care about the catastrophe when it affects them.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And only THEN will they start caring. When it's too late.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Very likely too late but then there will have to be some attempt to address or mitigate the problem. This will have to be mass action against governments and corporations that have consistently failed in their responsibilities despite repeated warnings.
Paul.
Post a Comment