Donya of Hervar leads a gorozdy, an informal association of several families, in an area called Hervar within a larger area held by the Rogaviki. Her wintergarth is at Owlhaunt on the Stallion River, four days' travel to the northwest of the outpost, Fuld. Zhanu, aged seventeen, is Donya's oldest child and Kyrian, eighteen, is her youngest husband.
Casiru from Arvanneth, aged fifty, is vicechief ot the criminal Rattlebone Brotherhood. Since a courier had informed Donya that Casiru was travelling by coach to Fuld, she sent Zhanu and Kyrian to bring him to Owlhaunt. All three ride there, accompanied by three packbeasts and one spare mount.
The Hervar kith hold a rich land where the riders scatter quail, see a flying pheasant and several game animals - deer, horse, moonhorn cattle and dwarf bison - and hear wild hounds and coyotes.
That is my summary of the first two pages. How much of such information do we retain on a first reading?
15 comments:
It's a good book, but my suspension of disbelief got in the way.
There's no reason why humans would have to genetically evolve to live as small bands of mobile huntr-gatherers.
That's how we spent 300,000 years, after all!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And the Barommians who conquered the Rahidian Empire also seemed to have had much the same kind of culture, without any need for genetic changes.
But, Anderson had a deeper idea in mind: could there be a mutation which would change a small group of people (the Rogaviki) into "undomesticated wild animals"? How might that work out?
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: that would be a disastrous handicap.
It's precisely human 'domestication' that allows us to cooperate -- and to cooperate in conflict, too, which gave those capable of it a massive, massive advantage in conflict between groups.
The last major change in humans was the 'behavioral modernity' that set in about 120-80,000 years ago; and that was associated with a sharp drop in male testosterone levels.
That in turn preceded the explosive spread of modern humans out of Africa, and their replacement of all other varieties of hominin.
It has to be acknowledged that 'wild' animals are simply at a tremendous evolutionary disadvantage compared to 'domesticated' ones.
NB: you can tell there was a drop in testosterone because of changes in skeletal formation.
"Out of Africa."
When I passed a young black guy wearing a medallion in the shape of Africa, I spontaneously responded, "Africa! Where we all come from!" and he agreed but it occurred to me afterwards that he might have meant the medallion as a statement specifically of Black identity but it doesn't matter. We are all descended from those original Africans.
Paul.
Ten men can kill one giraffe. Ten giraffes can't get together to kill one man.
But our biggest difference is that we are discussing and reflecting on what all the differences are which no other species can do. Language is our biggest cooperative enterprise. Mythologically, the Curse of Babel was imposed to prevent us from outperforming gods.
A dog can believe that its master is at the door but it cannot believe that he will return a week next Thursday.
Internalizing symbolic communication, we can think about everything beyond what is immediately in front of us: the past, the future, the distant, the imaginary, the hypothetical, the fictional, infinity, the square root of minus one, the impossible, the unknown, an object on the bottom of a sea on a planet orbiting a star that is so far away that its light will never reach Earth in the whole lifetime of this universe, books that our authors never wrote like LORD GREYSTOKE ON BARSOOM (or TARZAN ON MARS) to the uninitiated.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: In writing about THE WINTER OF THE WORLD your comments fits in to the objections I have about the Rogaviki. Any mutation making any group of humans again "undomesticated" would be catastrophic, making it very difficult to be cooperative in anything larger than small families. I think Anderson tried to get around that by making Rogaviki females (are they even any longer women?) hypersexualized, emitting pheromones that would attract desired males, explaining their polyandrous family arrangements.
The Rogaviki are intensely territorial about the lands held by by these polyandrous families, along the line of the Jugular River, and they seemed genetically hardwired for hunting bison. And they never seem to live anywhere, except along the Jugular and the Great Plains. That's a very dangerously narrow niche for any hominins to live in.
All this suggests to me that "Southrons" who finally get a correct understanding of the Rogaviki could fairly easily defeat them by decimating the bison herds. A culture based on bison and hard wired for hunting could not survive that. And the inability of the Rogaviki to organize on a large scale for long periods means a large and well disciplined army could defeat the Rogaviki, no matter how ferocious they were.
Paul: Heck, one man can kill a giraffe, with the right tools. What really requires cooperation would be hunting dangerous animals like mammoth elephants. For that you need disciplined hunters commanded by a chief who gives the necessary orders and assigns tasks.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that humans have always been -social- hunters, like wolves.
The human body plan -- which emerged with h. erectus, nearly 2 million years ago -- is superbly adapted to be a cursorial carnivore.
It's not an accident that wolves/dogs were the first animals to co-locate with us... and they've done very well out of it!
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And a species of social carnivores like mankind means hierarchical societies is natural for humans. That is, all human societies, without exception, have higher and lower status groups.
I assume the first "dogs" began as wolves hanging around the camps of hunter/gatherers about 30,000 years ago.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup. Probably actual domestication took some time. Dogs show sharp divergence from wolves (neoteny, etc.) by about 15,000 years ago.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, but one oddity is that dogs and wolves can still mate and have fertile offspring. So that divergence was not absolute.
By contrast, in THE WINTER OF THE WORLD humans and the Rogaviki diverged enough that any offspring they have are sterile. And I dislike how the Rogaviki callously discard such children thru exposure!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, but plenty of human cultures have done that too -- it's not a genetic peculiarity of theirs.
I don't think Poul -wanted- to admit how much advantage comes from the ability to cooperate in large groups and how much of a disadvantage thoroughgoing individualism was and is.
Kaor, Paul!
Of course I agree, the monstrosity of abortion/infanticide is one of the most common crimes of a Fallen human race. I was reminded of how the "Didache," an early Christian manual written around AD 70-80, forbade Christians to practice abortion. Early Christians had a reputation for rescuing infants abandoned to exposure.
I think you are right, what you said about Anderson's apparent reluctance to accept that thoroughgoing individualism has dangerous disadvantages. And that sprang from his libertarian leanings.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I think that Poul, in his last years, came to the conclusion that humans couldn't live in a libertarian society 'by themselves' -- there was that story where there is a libertarian culture, but it's run by a huge AI...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, "pure" libertarianism is hopelessly unworkable. The State will continue to be a necessity.
Ad astra! Sean
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