As usual, life and fiction proceed in parallel. Fictionally, in Poul Anderson's
A Stone In Heaven, Flandry and Banner have arrived on Ramnu. Lifewise, I am looking at sunlight in the garden and drinking coffee. Although life involves routines, each moment is unique and unrepeatable whereas Flandry and Banner travel to Ramnu every time one of us reads or rereads
A Stone... But they do not experience it like that. We are to imagine that, for them too, each moment is unique and that their lives include many mundane details that are not recorded in the text. After breakfast, I will brush my teeth. Fictional characters must do this and a million other such things as well but almost always off-stage. We could say this about any novel, of course. I just happen to be rereading
A Stone... right now.
Sandra Tamarin eats breakfast, served by domestic staff, with her son, Eric, in Anderson's Mirkheim. Earlier in A Stone..., Chives had served Flandry a souffle for breakfast. So the mundane has its place in fiction although our attention is usually on the dramatic. Arrived on Ramnu, Flandry must hurry to stay ahead of his opponents. So the narrative continues.
4 comments:
Servants preparing meals seems rather non-mundane to this 21st century person. Such things as electric stoves and hot & cold running water makes servants less needed for a leisurely lifestyle. Are servants likely to ever be common again in a technically advanced society?
Very wealthy people usually have servants. My family had them in Kenya. Believe me, it's a big plus.
Every so often I run across some figure for how many human laborers it would take to provide the work we get from fossil fuels, hydro dams, nuclear reactors etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_slave
I expect the number of energy slaves per person in Kenya when you lived there was much less than it has been in Canada in my lifetime. So the benefit of having human servants was greater and the number of people poor enough to think being a paid servant was a good option was greater. My understanding is that the industrial revolution made factory work better paying, so rich people had to pay more to have a servant.
Any figure for 'energy slaves' will be complicated by estimates of the efficiency of both human labor and machines. The innovations Artorius et al. in "To Turn the Tide" introduce to 2nd century Rome mostly increase the efficiency of human & animal muscle power. Than there is the Energy Return on Energy Invested issue. It takes energy to build a water or wind mill, to mine coal or to build a steam engine. How much energy do you get back for what you put in. The innovations in agriculture in that story all improve EROI for muscle power.
Kaor, Jim!
I agree with Stirling, wealthy people are likely to have some servants, or at least hire businesses to do things like lawn mowing. Why not, if they can afford it?
Ad astra! Sean
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