The Alpha Centaurian ambassador to the Solar Technate reminisces about his home planet, Thor. Regular readers recognize this as a familiar kind of Andersonian colony planet:
steep, windy mountains;
whistling, stormy skies;
heaths;
forests;
broad plains;
grey seas pulled by three moons;
higher gravity;
an ancestral hall;
stone;
timber;
smoky rafters;
ancient battle flags;
horses;
hounds;
hunting;
proud nobles;
solid yeomen;
winter snow;
green spring.
Will human beings be able to reproduce their history like this on an extra-solar planet? Doubt it.
11 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Why not? I can imagine similar conditions encouraging the bringing back of similar social, cultural, and political patterns. Esp. if such a process is spread out over thousands of years.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
But the physical environment would have to be exactly right. It sounds just as if they had found a previously unknown continent on Earth.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
My belief is that it's theoretically possible some extra-Solar planets will be very Earth-like. Also, Thor is not entirely Earth-like, having a gravity heavier than Earth's.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The three moons and the higher gravity (the latter implied, I think) are concessions to Thor being a different planet but the living conditions seem exactly Earth-like.
Paul.
Even with a near identical climate to some region on earth, such as given in your list, a society resembling the society of that earth region of eg: 1300 seems wildly unlikely. The colony planet will have electricity and electronic communications, which would make the society more like present day Scandinavia than something with "smoky rafters, proud nobles, & solid yeomen".
Indeed.
I think Anderson liked writing about certain kinds of societies.
Paul: yeah, he did.
Jim: Unless the original colonists -wanted- to produce a society like that!
After all, you'd have to be fairly weird to want to fossick off like that...
Kaor, Jim and Mr. Stirling!
Jim: I think you are missing a point I thought was plain: Thor is an ancient colonial world. Humans had been living there for thousands of years. Iow, more than enough time for many civilizations to rise and fall there. So, yes, a dominant society like what we see described on Thor in THE LONG WAY HOME could exist.
Mr. Stirling: Anderson did suggestr refugees, malcontents, religious groups, etc., could leave an Earth that was smothering/oppressing them if the chance to settle other worlds ever came. As we see in ORBIT UNLIMITED, when political dissenters left Earth to settle Rustum.
Ad astra! Sean
Mr Stirling:
I can see lots of people wanting to be the proud noble in such a society. You would have to be *really* weird, probably deluded, to deliberately put yourself any lower on the social scale.
The norm of history is "peasant ruled by brigands". What we have now isn't perfect, just much better than the norm.
Kaor, Jim!
Not quite, you are overlooking something I've been aware of for decades: all nations, all societies, without exception, have "aristocracies," if we define that to mean groups or classes tending to produce most of the leaders of a society. Most often they tend to be concentrated in the wealthiest and most powerful sections of a nation.
And it doesn't matter if some de facto aristocracies don't use the nobiliary titles familiar to us from European history. What matters is the reality of who has influence or holds the real power. Some examples are: the Soviet aristocracy were the members of the Communist Party and the nomenklatura. For the US, the UK, Canada, France, Japan, the aristocracies are the professional politicians and senior bureaucrats.
I would find this unobjectionable if the "aristocrats" were at least reasonably competent in governing their countries: but that has been less and less the case, esp. as some parties became more and more insane, corrupt, and woke over the past half century.
Bluntly, most people don't care that much about politics as long as their leaders don't blunder too badly for too long. And it also helps if the aristocracies, formal or de facto, are open to new men joining them and rising thru the ranks. That helps to keep leaders from becoming stagnant, ossified, corrupt.
Yes, the norm of history has often been "peasants ruled by brigands." Except brigands don't always stay bandits. Stirling, in his Emberverse books, shows how, as time passed, the thugs who formed most of the founding aristocrats of the Portland Protective Association, became milder as time passed. Many of the sons and grandsons of the founders showed themselves to be decent, conscientious, and well meaning leaders. Even some of those founders were not always bad!
And too many real world nations, in Latin America, Africa, Asia, are ruled by brigands and corrupt kleptocrats.
Ad astra! Sean
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