When describing Bayard Story, the omniscient narrator presents a few small clues that we will not understand until later by which time we will have forgotten them in any case. Story's gait suggests that he has used his muscles a lot and maybe in severe conditions. Yes, he has spent much time on the sub-Jovian planet, Babur, and needs to keep that top secret. He has a slight although unidentifiable non-Terrestrial accent. It is Hermetian, Traver class, and that also must be kept secret.
That raises another point that I had not thought of before. In The Day of Their Return, Poul Anderson shows us how Anglic phraseology varies between the diverse social groups on Aeneas and, in Mirkheim, we notice distinctive Hermetian turns of phrase. However, these planetary populations will also speak Anglic in their own peculiar accents that will differ from anything that was ever heard on Earth. Ideally, actors in Technic History films would speak in these accents so that we would instantly know from their speech alone which character was from Altai, Ramanujan, Dennitza etc. In The People of the Wind, we are told that it is impossible for Terran spies to pass themselves off as Avalonian human beings. The totality of speech, walk etc is too dissimilar. But actors ought to be able to do it.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Unless, of course, the Terrans had recruited Avalonians of either species as their spies.
Ad astra! Sean
The Mirkheim dispute illustrates how at higher levels, economics (economic mineral deposits, for example) overlap with military power.
If any of the main contenders get control of Mirkheim, it'll give them a massive advantage... so the others are prepared to fight to prevent it.
I think I mentioned that it wasn't the economics of gold mines in the Transvaal that started the Boer War (strictly speaking the Second Boer War), it was the power they conferred on a formerly insignificant anti-Imperial community -- guns, artillery, the attention of rival great powers like Germany, a possible anti-British core for a united South Africa. That was what London cared about.
The two Anglo-South African wars in the Nineteenth Century certainly promised (or didn't, in the case of 1880-81) some very real economic benefits; as much as London's defenders cited "the rights of Englishmen" various opportunities for profit (gold, diamonds, etc.) made a difference in the strategic calculus for London.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, your analysis makes sense and fits into how real people are likely to behave. Existential threats, or opportunities, is what really rouses nations and passions.
Ad astra! Sean
DaveShoup: Nope, the British government didn't need to fight the Boers for British investors to reap the profits from South African minerals.
The Kimberly diamond fields were annexed to the Cape without any problems of note, and the Transvaal goldfields were dominated by British capital which made money hand over fist -- which is why most of the mining magnates did -not- support Cecil Rhodes' attempt to overthrow the Transvaal government.
They didn't need to take military or political risks to make enormous returns. The money was rolling in, and the Boer government's taxes were (by those standards) quite moderate.
It was the -political- consequences of the Transvaalers getting their hands on those revenues which disturbed the London politicians, quite rightly.
It threatened the Cape's alignment with the British Empire and threatened to bring European rivals of Britain into the picture. That was the real issue.
That was the intolerable part and it was why the British government forced the issue in the late 1890's. In 1879-80, they'd been willing to write the Boer republics off after a few minor defeats because basically they didn't matter much. The gold changed that. (And Germany's annexation of SW Africa, too, of course.)
The scale of the effort needed to defeat the Boers showed that Milner and Chamberlain's calculations were quite correct. The gold mines were making them dangerously strong.
The Kimberly region was essentially a no man's land in 1871; the Cape Colony, Transvaal, the Orange Free State and the Griquas all laid claim to the diamond fields, and the British "found" for the Griquas, who promptly asked to become a British protectorate. Given the South Africans had nothing approaching a standing army or even a militia that - even once mobilized - could sustain an expeditionary force, not much they could have done to oppose the British outside of their own territory.
In 1879-80, one of the best (on paper) generals of the British Army with a strong force of British regulars was utterly defeated in three different actions with South African militia are their own ground; in 1898-1900, the South Africans still didn't have anything approaching a standing army and - as demonstrated during the initial phase of the war - no way to sustain an expeditionary force against the Cape or Natal, and were barely regarded as members of the international community. (of course, they still fought the British to a standstill and required the British to mobilize the largest expeditionary force they had ever deployed before WW I to force the South Africans to surrender.
London went to war with the South Africans to impose political control over the two states, and entirely because of the mineral resources (if their economies had depended on cattle, London would not have cared); given the reality of British sea power in the late Nineteenth Century, there were no "European rivals of Britain" with any ability to intervene in the region, as was demonstrated quite clearly in 1914-15, when the Germans were crushed by the South Africans in about nine months, without any significant British troop presence.
Kaor, Dave!
I feel the need to express some doubts here. Stirling was trying to say the revenues obtained by the Boers from those gold mines were going to make them much stronger and more powerful after 1890. That, plus the presence of the Germans in what is now Tanzania was why the UK decided the Boers had to be brought to heel.
As for WW I, the UK Navy cut off the German possessions in Africa from being reinforced by Germany. So it's no surprise Anglo/South African forces were able to occupy them.
Ad astra! Sean
Yes, the RN cut off the German colonial forces in German SW and SE Africa in 1914-15; they did the same thing in 1898-1900. In the steel and steam era, there was never a naval threat to the British Empire in southern Africa, and there never could be until the Empire ceased to be an empire.
In terms of military forces, the two South African republics were less of a threat to the British colonies of the Cape and Natal than Luxembourg was to the Germans in 1914 or 1940.
Kaor, Dave!
I still have to disagree. The Boer states could have become, long term, a threat to the British in southern Africa. Better to nullify that threat before it became one.
Ad astra! Sean
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