"'Incredible as it seems, I'm beginning to think that the forest here forms a communication network.'
"'The original grapevine telegraph, huh?'"
-CHAPTER XVII, p. 149.
On Freehold in the Technic History, a specially created kind of plant carries signals across a continent at neural speeds. John Ridenour comments:
"'Grapevine telegraph!'"
-Poul Anderson, "Outpost of Empire" IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender of the Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, February 2010), pp. 1-72 AT p. 44.
- and has met similar setups on nonhuman planets which would include the Alori if they were in the same timeline.
In an interstellar multispecies civilization, it will be easy for "barbarians" in the Roman sense, outsiders, to pass themselves off as members of just another species from within the borders:
"'Among so many races, it was easy to pose as members of yet another. I myself have spent years wandering about your territories, investigating them in every aspect."
-CHAPTER XVI, p. 145.
And, in the Technic History, a leader of the Scothani tells Flandry:
"'You're typical of your kind. I've studied the Empire long enough to recognize you; I've traveled there myself, incognito, and met persons aplenty.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Tiger by the Tail" IN Captain Flandry..., pp. 241-276 AT p. 246.
And Aycharaych from Chereion within the Merseian Roidhunate passes himself off as from the Imperial planet, Jean-Baptiste, which does not exist.
Finally, here we have two more Latin plurals: Alori and Scothani.
10 comments:
The problem with investigating is that people tend to find what they expect or want to find -- that Scothiani of Poul's is an example. 'Confirmation bias' is the technical name.
Poul and I were discussing WW1 once and he blamed 'politicians and generals' for not proposing a compromise peace once the cost of the war became plain.
He was disconcerted when I pointed out that there -were- politicians who did...
...and that without exception (apart from in Russia) the peoples concerned massively repudiated them and instead backed people like Lloyd George and Clemenceau and Ludendorff, who backed total mobilization and victory at all costs.
And that it was the most advanced countries that were the most grimly determined to prevail.
It was the peasant armies that broke under the strain of total war, and the armies of literate, nationally conscious clerks and factory workers who fought on to the bitter end.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Basically, I agree. But, it would have been wise of Germany agreeing to at least trying (as Kaiser Karl of Austria-Hungary desired) to make real offers for a compromise peace at the beginning of 1917. That way, if the UK and France stubbornly insisted on war to the bitter end, the onus for doing so would be on the Entente powers, not the Central Allies. Such an effort might even have delayed the entry of the US into the war.
I am not quite sure you are right about those "peasant armies," if you mean Tsarist Russia. The collapse of Nicholas II's gov't in early 1917 was not due to the armies at the front mutinying or disintegrating (they remained loyal to the end). Rather, it was due to the incompetent dunderheads in Petrograd who so badly mishandled what began as trivial disturbances that they got completely out of control.
Ad astra! Sean
"The problem with investigating is that people tend to find what they expect or want to find -- that Scothiani of Poul's is an example. 'Confirmation bias' is the technical name."
If one recognizes that, one can *try* to ask, "what would be evidence *against* my theory?". Then one has a chance of being 'less wrong'.
Jim,
This is the scientific method.
Paul.
Paul: it is the scientific method... but that is profoundly psychologically unnatural, and requires constant, exhausting vigilance against not only the errors of others but what your mind is pushing you towards.
Hence the 'replication crisis' in many scientific fields recently.
Reason evolved as a method of -persuasion-, not of 'objective' enquiry aimed at 'truth'.
Using it otherwise is a constant strain, a continual pushing-back against our deep instincts.
"Reason evolved as a method of -persuasion-, not of 'objective' enquiry aimed at 'truth'."
That mitigates the unnaturalness of the scientific method. It is easy psychologically to look for evidence against your rival's theory. You are unlikely to persuade your rival with that evidence, but you can persuade third parties.
I recently read "How to have impossible conversations" about conversing with someone you profoundly disagree with. To some extent it is Socratic method to get your conversational partner to have a bit more doubt about their position, and just as importantly to keep in mind that you might find the other person has better reasons for their position than you thought.
Once, at a leftist gathering, a vocal minority was really pushing some idiosyncratic theory of human origins which would have made humanity much younger than anyone else thinks. One leading member of the minority was being pressed in argument by a few people. During a pause in the argument, I asked him one question about his theory. (I can't remember what it was after all this time.) His initial response to me was: "Alright! What's your theory of human origins, then?!" I replied, "I am only trying to understand what you are saying." He remarked that the conversation had suddenly taken a much more rational tone and responded to my question. I just wanted to get some clarity out of a lot of heat. (I haven't heard anything else about that theory since then.)
Paul: I remember having a conversation with a blank-slatist at university (a Marxist, as it happened, but a 19th-century Benthamite would have had the same view), in which he denied the existence of a 'human nature' apart from environmental influences.
I finally said: "If that's true, why can't you teach a baboon to read?"
He was actually flummoxed; that hadn't occurred to him. An extreme example, granted.
Sometimes we have to educate our fellow students. Although I always learned one hell of a lot more than I taught even when I was supposed to be teaching.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
But a good example! I too don't believe it's going to be that easy to change human beings and their societies. Blank-slatism is pure nonsense. And has been the cause of horrendous agonies.
Ad astra! Sean
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