Coya Conyon's life and times;
the relationship between the planets, Satan and Mirkheim, featured respectively in the earlier novel, Satan's World, and in the later novel, Mirkheim;
the multi-species Supermetals company which mines expensive supermetals directly from the surface of Mirkheim.
Coya
She dislikes "...those money-machine merchant princes..." (p. 640) of the Polesotechnic League.
Her maternal grandfather, Nicholas van Rijn, was Dutch and Malay, her grandmother was Mexican and Chinese, her mother was called Beatrix Yeo and her father, Malcolm Conyon, was of Scottish-Hermetian, African-Nyanzan descent.
She is "...a typical modern human." (pp. 643-644)
Whereas van Rijn's generation rarely married, Malcolm Conyon's did and Coya's is "...reviving patrilineal surnames." (p. 644)
Although she never fully approved of the League, now that it is breaking down, she sometimes dreads the future.
Van Rijn says that, as youngsters become more prudish, the powers that be become more brutish but Coya replies that:
"'The second is part of the reason for the first.'" (p. 659)
There is social and generational change in the Solar Commonwealth.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Just a bit puzzled by that reviving of patrilineal surnames in Coya's time. The practical and personal USEFULNESS of a standardized naming system seems obvious, so I'm surprised that for maybe a century such surnames were falling out of use, at least on Earth. Given that, what did people use for identifying themselves?
And Coya was right to feel dread for the future! About a century after "Lodestar"/MIRKHEIM Technic civilization collapsed into the Time of Troubles.
Ad astra! Sean
Re: Surnames
Patrilineal isn't the only option.
Matrilineal is an option.
So is something like the system used in Iceland, in which the surname is X'sson or X'sdottir.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree, re surnames. But the matrilineal option never really caught on with most people. Yes, I have read of how Iceland still uses the older Scandinavian method: Jon (John) Palsson (Paul), etc.
Ad astra! Sean
Patrilineal surnames are very convenient. The weakness is, of course, that as the old saying goes, who your mother is, that's a fact: who your father is, that's an opinion.
(Before DNA tests, that is.)
Sean: that "Paul Paul's son" system is a very old one -- it may go right back to Proto-Indo-European. Many of the very earliest recorded IE languages use it; the Mycenaean Greeks, for instance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, what you said in your first comment immediately above. It reminded me of how English law laid down the principle that the children of a married couple would be legally the children of the husband, even if there were times people doubted he was the father of all of them.
And we see traces of that ancient naming system in Homer's poems and the Old Testament. E.g., Agamemnon the son of Atreus.
Ad astra! Sean
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