A single massive avalanche of ice and snow kills Yewwl's husband, sons and daughter and destroys their tribal Shrine which Miriam Abrams says is the equivalent of destroying Jerusalem. Thus, one enormous catastrophe happens casually in this opening chapter:
"The snowcliff stirred..." (p. 10)
The narrative soon contextualizes this catastrophe within Poul Anderson's Technic History. Miriam, nicknamed "Banner," is from the warm, dry, snowless, colony planet, Dayan, which explains the comparison that she makes with Jerusalem. She is Max Abram's daughter. Commander Abrams recited the Kaddish for Ensign Flandry when the latter was missing in action on Starkad a lifetime ago.
Banner complains about the Grand Duke of Hermes and says that she will appeal to Admiral Flandry. Despite its newly created Ramnuan environment, this new narrative is embedded in the Technic History.
6 comments:
We 21st-century urbanites don't realize how -dangerous- most of nature is.
The urbanites who get out into nature more than occasionally get *some* idea of that.
Eg: for XC skiing near Calgary I took some lessons about how to recognize avalanche terrain to avoid it & how to minimize the hazard if I had to cross it. I recall hearing about a group of skiers who crossed an avalanche track properly (one at a time so if they were unlucky there would be several people looking for one buried victim rather than looking for several victims) but stopped for lunch only a short way into the trees. Then an unusually large avalanche came down & went far enough into the trees to kill them. If they had carried on at least a few hundred meters from where avalanches in previous years had knocked down trees they would have been safe.
Similarly there are rules in parts of the Banff Park, that to avoid bear attacks, go in groups over a certain size, so your noise will tell the bear you are there & the number of humans will be intimidating to the bear.
It helps that millennia of human groups with at *least* spears have killed off the predators most prone to attacking humans.
Yeah, but they don't have the sense of continual menace people in primitive cultures did. Not least from other human beings, but also from natural disasters, predators, and disease.
I read about an avalanche both in A STONE IN HEAVEN and in ON HER MAJESTY'S SECRET SERVICE.
In a hunter-gatherer setup, if there's a bad drought you're screwed -- you either have to travel and fight some other band for their territory, or just die.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Which is exactly what we mentioned as happening on t'Kela in "Territory" as conditions worsened on that planet.
Ad astra! Sean
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