I imagine not only cinematic but also graphic adaptations of Poul Anderson's Technic History. At the beginning of The Earth Book Of Stormgate, we should see Hloch on Mount Anrovil in the Weathermother followed by scenes of everything that he mentions:
Spearhead Lake
the Avalonian cities, Gray and Centauri
a copper mine
guests of Hloch's parents, roaming and hunting
human members of Stormgate Choth, flying with Ythrians
Rennhi writing The Sky Book Of Stormgate
ruined landscapes under skies gone strange after the Terran War
etc
Any visual adaptation that included every detail would be lengthy like the Mahabharata - where Bumper Issue No. 59 is about "THE PRELUDE TO WAR"! - but also worthwhile.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
There's also the Ace Books edition of A STONE IN HEAVEN, so profusely illustrated that it might as well be a comic book adaptation of the story. I esp. appreciated how the artist took care to read the novel before drawing--because of how well those illustrations fitted in with the story. The depictions we get of Flandry, Chives, Miriam Abrams, etc., matched how Anderson described them.
The same can be said of THE DEMON OF SCATTERY (co-authored by Anderson and Broxon) with the slight difference the artist gave some of the illustrations a Medieval look.
Ad astra! Sean
And the horned helmets on the Vikings. Poul mentions this charitably, as an 'artistic convention'.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha, I forgot about those ridiculous horns! Of course real viking bandits did not wear horned helmets.
One thing I wondered about is why European armies stopped wearing helmets after about 1650. It seems so obvious helmets would protect against some head wounds. Which is why I noted with approval those morion helmets worn by Spanish soldiers.
It was only until WW I that armies got serious again about protective head wear!
Ad astra! Sean
Basically, helmets went out of use because the added protection wasn't worth the weight.
A helmet wouldn't stop a musket ball; exploding shells were rare and shrapnel not all that common. And when fighting with cold steel, what was usually the biggest menace was a stab with a bayonet, which helmets didn't protect against. They would have been useful if you were fighting a cavalryman chopping at your head, but that simply wasn't common enough to make helmets worthwhile. Some cavalry did continue to wear them right through to 1914, btw.
Helmets came back (rapidly) in WW1 because advances in artillery from roughly 1890 through 1910 had made shrapnel and shell fragments ubiquitous.
Most casualties on the Western Front were caused by artillery and overhead shelling was very common. Hence head wounds from -low velocity- pieces of metal were extremely common.
(Machine guns were very deadly against troops in the open, but that's why everybody dug trenches. Machine guns pinned you down under the hammer of the guns.)
That all made the 2.5-3.5 pounds weight of a helmet worthwhile whenever the enemy had artillery. It wouldn't stop a bullet but it would stop shell fragments and it cut casualties substantially.
Note that British troops in -colonial- engagements between 1919 and 1939 usually didn't wear helmets -- because the people they were fighting didn't have artillery and mortars, usually.
Now there's a different situation; modern armor will stop light bullets from assault rifles.
Note how many recent medal citations in the American army have things like "struck in the chest by bullets, got back up and did X". Before the turn of the century that guy would have been dead.
Modern body armor makes artillery less deadly because it protects more of the body from shell fragments, not just the head, which wasn't practical with metal armor; and it renders assault rifle rounds much less effective.
That's affecting weapons.
The latest American army rifle, the M-7, uses a 6.8x51 round -- much heavier and with a higher velocity than the 5.56. That's because the American military is reorienting towards "peer competitors" like Russia and China who can equip their troops with good body armor, which makes the added weight and recoil worthwhile.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating, many thanks for this mini essay. Your comments does make sense of why helmets mostly disappeared in the 1600's and came back in a rush with WW I. You also made sense of both soldiers and police wear modern day body armor.
I am glad not everybody in DC are bungling idiots and are modernizing weapons. My view is that it's all too likely the US might eventually have a dangerous showdown with China. I'm inclined to think a declining, shambolic Russia less dangerous. Maybe!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, China might be a problem in the next decade. After that, the demographic collapse will make them a lot less dangerous. Their labor force is declining by around 5 million a year now, and their population is decreasing by 3 million and that's rising rapidly.
East Asia is seeing really catastrophic demographics across all boundaries. South Korea has a TFR of 0.7 now, and in Seoul it's below 0.5 -- urban China is fairly similar. Most women there simply don't have children now.
Sean: also, most of a government's work just goes on regardless of who's at the top. That can be a long-term problem but usually doesn't fluctuate much in the short term.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The more I read about China's economic and social problems the more I can see why you think like that. If it wasn't for the mostly self inflicted problems the US has I would feel schadenfreude!
I would put at least part of the blame for the demographic catastrophe China faces to its since reversed "one child only" policy, in which the Maoist regime permitted parents to have only one child, and forbidden to have more. And brutally enforced for decades by compulsory abortions. That, plus the preference for that single child to be male, contributed to other problems like the grotesque imbalance in the numbers of males/females in China. Fifteen males to only one female was the average I think recalling.
A tyrannical state can bring about the depopulation of a country (as in China and the former USSR), but it's much harder to reverse that! It might very well take a strong religious faith to reverse demographic crashes.
All the same, my fear is that as long as bungling left wing Democrats manage to control the US, China will be tempted to indulge in dangerous adventurism.
I agree, it's the civil service that keeps gov'ts, bad and good, more or less functioning.
Ad astra! Sean
" "one child only" policy, in which the Maoist regime"
My understanding is that under Mao large families were encouraged. Given the already high population of China this seems like a bad idea.
Mao's successors introduced the one child policy. In retrospect and even at the time a two child policy would have been much better, leading to a long term leveling off of population rather than a fairly swift decline.
Sean: yes, the one-child policy did have bad consequences.
OTOH, South Korea never had anything of the sort -- if anything, its government has been pro-natalist. But its TFR is now even lower than China's, mainly due to its higher degree of urbanization, apparently.
It's my observation that governments can drive fertility -down-, but it's virtually impossible to force it -up- for anything but a brief blip.
Kaor, to Both!
I will respond to your interesting comments when I have more time. Real life gets in the way!
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: I should hope the monstrous Mao, in his saner moments, would approve of people having large families! Millions of Chinese died in his purges and concentration camps. To say nothing of the millions more who died because of such lunacies of his as the Great Leap Backwards and the Cultural Revolution.
No, I don't want any gov't mandating how many children parents can have. First, it's none of the State's business. Second, any such policy so often backfires catastrophically. Third, abortion is a monstrosity I regard with horror and disgust.
Mr. Stirling: I agree with both your points, about how easy it is for a bad gov't to crush reproduction, and how hard it is to reverse that.
What you said about S Korea is concerning. It is one thing for prosperity to cause a leveling off of population growth--and quite another for a nation to succumb to a demographic death spiral!
All this strengthens my view: men and women will need to realize their are better things in life than partying, boozing, and drugging, such as having families. And I still believe a strongly held faith encourages that.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in South Korea, there seems to have been a massive disconnect between men and women in the younger generations.
The much lower TFR's in East Asia vs. say, Europe, may be due to 'cultural lag'.
That is, East Asia has 'modernized' (effectively, Westernized) in some respects as it industrialized. Both sexes are now highly educated, for example.
But male expectations of what women will do in the context of marriage has changed much less. Not surprising, when you think how recently these were peasant countries where traditional customs were overwhelmingly dominant.
This creates a clash between male and female expectations, with men thinking that their prospective mates will act like their mothers and grandmothers. And women being massively unwilling to do that.
It's particularly severe in South Korea, but there are strong resemblances between the situation there and in Japan and China. Including Taiwan, where the TFR is now around 0.87 -- second-lowest in the world, though China's is nearly as low and comparing -urban- populations is as low or lower.
In the West the position of women was always better than it was in the "Confucian world", not least for reasons of religion; and we modernized over many more generations, which gave people an opportunity to adapt gradually.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Simply on a human scale, for these human beings, the situation described as happening in China, Japan, S Korea, and Taiwan is very bad, downright tragic. The apparent inability of "Confucian" nations to adjust to technological modernization so that men and women can live together, including being open to families (made worse in China by Maoist brutality), is setting the stage for an unprecedented tragedy. These countries have technically modernized, but not in an organic way, unlike in the West, where science and modernization had their origins in Christianity.
Ad astra! Sean
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