Monday 16 September 2024

Alien Or Future Concepts

An sf writer should be able to imagine new concepts requiring new terminologies, e.g., in the Merseian language, Eriau, or in future descendants of English. (In Poul Anderson's Technic History, English becomes Anglic which, eventually, becomes ancient.)

Merseians differentiate "civilian" from "military" differently and less clearly than Terrans. A datholch is an aristocrat heading an enterprise to expand the Race's frontier but that frontier might be of knowledge, trade, influence, territory or something else. Thus, Ydwyr the Seeker, a nephew of the Roidhun, is a scientist and also a datholch but others of his rank might be in entirely different professions.

Among the post-human Kirkasanters, reyad is a need to:

search;
track animals;
find what is new;
be alone in wild places.

Thus, not a single need exactly. One Kirkasanter explains reyad by saying that their people were hunters until recently. I can empathize more easily with aloneness in wilderness than with hunting but both are reyad.

2 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Humans were hunters -- apex predators -- for nearly 300,000 years, until the invention of agriculture. So were our pre-human ancestors back to H. Erectus, nearly 2 million years ago. Nothing new there.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And only members of the landless vach Urdiolch could be datholchs.

Ad astra! Sean