Trader To The Stars (collection: van Rijn)
The Trouble Twisters (collection: Falkayn; van Rijn cameo)
Satan's World (novel: van Rijn; Falkayn)
Mirkheim (novel: van Rijn; Falkayn)
At the end of Satan's World:
"'What a girl she was,' [Falkayn] murmured.
"'Who, Veronica?' Chee asked.
"'Well, yes. Among others.'"
-Poul Anderson, Satan's World IN Anderson. David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, March 2010), pp. 329-598 AT XXVI, p. 598.
Near the beginning of Mirkheim, Falkayn:
"'I used to daydream about an infinity of women, all beautiful and accessible. But I found that you were plenty, and then some.'"
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise of the Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT I, p. 32.
Much has changed between the two novels, not least Falkayn's attitude. If we read the Tetralogy, then later we read The Earth Book of Stomgate which includes "Lodestar" which recounts the beginning of Falkayn's relationship with Coya Conyon whereas, if we read The Technic Civilization Saga, then we read "Lodestar" between Satan's World and Mirkheim.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
The simple passing of time sometimes allows us the opportunity of gaining wisdom. With, in this case, Falkayn coming to realize it's better to be happy with one woman than having a harem.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that's something that age contributes to. The hormonal frenzy of the first 10 years after puberty is hard on males.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! And so many, many males (and females!) make so many mistakes during those ten years, often ruining their lives. Everything from catching health wrecking STDs to having children too soon.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in most cultures, women start having children (or did, until recently) within about 3 years of puberty. Age of marriage for men is more variable and often later.
In ours, it's historically been commonest to wait about 10 years -- the average age of marriage for women in Shakespeare's England was 26 (and for men about 2 years later).
This is historically an unusual pattern, tho' it's now gone global.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, even tho I thought the pattern was somewhat different if you belonged to royalty or the aristocracy, with first marriages for such persons being at younger ages.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it was, but that was a very inconsiderable fraction of the population.
Americans married earlier than their English ancestors -- about 5 years earlier, generally -- because of the higher incomes and cheaper land here.
The basic cause was economic: you had to be able to establish a household, however modest, to marry. That was easier if there was a labor shortage and an open land frontier. As Benjamin Franklin pointed out in the 1760's, the US population was doubling every 25 years, whereas in England it took well over 50 years.
(That's without immigration; also, death rates were lower in the American colonies because the lower population density reduced infectious disease.)
This had a major effect on birth-rates. English total fertility rates were much lower than American, but this was essentially solely due to later age of marriage -- births outside marriage were rare and rarely ended well.
In both countries, women had children at roughly 2 year intervals from marriage to menopause -or- natural infertility. Which is fairly common, btw, mostly having to do with the immune system becoming sensitized and treating sperm and ova as foreign matter.
It wasn't until the later 19th century (from roughly about 1870) that -married- fertility began to decline in the English-speaking world.
The English-speaking peoples (and NW Europeans in general) also had high rates of never-married individuals; in late Stuart England, it hit 25% of women, and the population actually declined slightly between the 1680's and 1720. Rates of never-married individuals were, again, much lower in the American colonies.
The cause was the same economic one that produced late marriage. They had what amounted to a strong taboo against two sexually active/fertile married couples under the same roof, so you had to be able to support a separate household to marry.
Ireland was a partial exception, until the Famine, because poor rural people could become "cottars", sub-tenants who paid for a small patch of land sub-leased from a farmer by contributing labor as rent, living off the resulting potato-patch.
Very few actual -farmers- died in the Famine; it was nearly all landless laborers and sub-tenants, who were the majority of the population at the time.
That changed drastically in the next generation. Sub-tenants and laborers died very disproportionately, and they also emigrated much more than anyone who stood to inherit tenure of a farm.
The remaining population changed their mating habits drastically: age of marriage went up enormously, getting higher than in England (a complete reversal from the pre-1848 situation), and the proportion of never-married individuals went from negligible to, again, higher than in England.
Late-19th century and early 20th-century Ireland became notorious for all the bachelors and spinsters, not even counting the large proportion of celibate religious dedicants.
Again, in America (and Canada, Australia etc.) Irish people continued their habits of early and near-universal marriage and hence very high birth-rates much longer.
Thank you for articles in the combox.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You are right, I should have remembered how practical economics forced most of the British to at least delay marriage. I then remembered how you referenced that pathetic painting of the Anglican curate and his fiancee wistfully holding hands as they dreamed of someday, possibly, being able to marry. The problem for them being the curate's need to obtain a benefice coming with an adequate income before they could marry.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup.
Class came into that -- as you went up the social scale, the scale of the necessary household went up too.
A skilled working-class man making 150 pounds a year in Victorian England could marry and would be regarded as affluent in the circles he moved in, though if he was making less than 50 he probably couldn't or wouldn't.
But someone with middle-class connections would be very, very iffy at anything around 200 and definitely couldn't at less than 100.
Incidentally, it was rising expectations and slowly growing incomes which resulted in upper-class and then middle-class families restricting fertility inside marriage. It cost more and more to 'establish' a son, or get a daughter married well. The collapse of farming profits (and landlords' rents) after 1879 didn't help either.
An Anglican priest with no private income and a benefice of say 150 pounds could and sometimes did marry, but they (and their children) would be regarded as 'poor as Church mice' by their families and friends.
They couldn't send the children to really good schools; they'd have to either use the village school, or a "grammar" school taking only day-pupils, for example.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
IOW, economics and the desire to maintain a reasonably satisfactory social status determined for most Britons what they believed would be practical.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, like most places and times.
The collapse of birth-rates globally, even in places that had early universal marriage and biological-maximum TFR's until recently is part of the same process.
You might call it "uneven Westernization". Eg., making marriage a matter of individual choice.
This has had deeply weird consequences in some countries.
The huge male surplus in China, for instance.
Or the widespread repudiation of marriage itself by women in South Korea. They get to chose now... but male expectations haven't changed nearly as much, and the two clash badly.
So South Korea now has the lowest birthrate on record for anywhere ever, not counting the results of severe famine and the like.
It's under 1 child per woman -- 0.78 per woman according to US government data.
And the marriage rate there has fallen 35% in only 10 years!
We in the West had much longer to adjust to the same set of changes, so the consequences are (somewhat) less drastic.
Note that birth-rates in Europe have fallen more drastically in areas that were outside the -initial- wave of family modernization. Southern and eastern Europe more generally.
These were precisely the areas that had -higher- birth-rates in, say, 1950. But that was because the changes hadn't fully hit them yet.
When they did, adjustments couldn't keep up.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for these fascinating comments. I do have a few remarks.
One massive reason for that huge male to female imbalance in China was the horrendous "one child only" policy decreed by the Maoist regime decades ago. Resulting in couples being forced to abort all but one child. And, given the cultural preference for sons, it was daughters who ended up being killed most often.
Another problem we may live to see is that crash in fertility/population growth being seen in China, S Korea, and too many other countries are massive numbers of aging people being supported by fewer and fewer young people. That is going to lead to all kinds of very bad problems.
Incidentally, an economy now in serious trouble and an aging, declining population will narrow the window of opportunity for the Maoists in Peking to achieve their ambitions. That might make them reckless and dangerous!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: true enough, but something similar is seen in India, which didn't have a one-child policy, just not as drastically and in a more class and regionally selective way.
But if couples decide -- for their own reasons -- to have only one child, or only two, and there's a strong male preference, the same sort of selective abortion phenomenon will happen.
The Chinese economy is in worse shape than people realize. Just this week "Country Gardens", one of the big Chinese real-estate firms, has defaulted on debts of over $200 billion. The Hong Kong stock market has dropped more than 20% since the beginning of the year.
The Chinese economy is very highly leveraged -- a higher debt-to-income ratio than we have -- and Chinese savings are very strongly committed to real estate, much more than here.
A collapse in the real estate market will wipe out more than half of Chinese personal savings, -and- it'll bankrupt local governments, which depend heavily on taxes on land transfers and land pricing.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! I have heard of many people in India, use the monstrous crime of abortion to kill girls instead of boys. But, as far as I know, there was never a policy by the Indian gov't using force and coercion compelling people to abort their children. So these Indians were more guilty than the Chinese, some of whom could plead in extenuation that fear of the regime made them kill babies.
The articles I've been reading in NATIONAL REVIEW made exactly similar points about the poor state of the Chinese economy. One of them discussed Country Gardens, which seems to have collapsed a little sooner than the author expected.
We live in dangerously "interesting times"! If half or more of the savings of the Chinese are wiped out overnight that will lead to drastic threats to the Maoist regime, perhaps even open rebellion among the people or military coups.
If so many innocents were not going to suffer in such chaos I would be tempted to succumb to schadenfreude! The Maoists are so hideous they deserve to be overthrown.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: no argument. And Taiwan demostrates the Chinese are perfectly capable of operating a stable democracy if they get the chance.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! The Chinese are not genetically compelled to be anti-
democratic. I do think mainland China is not going to be a stable, real democracy anytime soon. Too many decades of Maoist tyranny have left their mark there. It would be a huge advance if a post-Maoist regime simply returned to Confucian ethics and ideals. That would be a start!
Ad astra! Sean
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