This story is divided into four narrative passages. The first passage, headed:
PARIS, TUESDAY, 10 OCTOBER 1307
- is historical fiction, not science fiction, because it does not disclose that one of its characters is a time traveller. It begins with a detailed Andersonian description of the urban environment:
Weather
Clouds race.
Wind booms and whines.
Dust whirls.
Chill.
Stenches
offal
horse droppings
privies
graves
smoke
Din
footfalls
hoof-beats
creaking wheels
thudding hammers
chatter
anger
plea
pitch
song
prayer
church bells
Folk
housewife
artisan
priest
mountebank
blind beggar
merchant with apprentices
drunk man-at-arms
gowned student
foreign visitor
carter
That is only the first page. The covert time traveller makes first appearance on the second page.
13 comments:
Though almost all urban artisan's wives helped them with the family business -- "housewife" didn't mean "just does housework and child care" back then.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
That must have been true even of the wives of blacksmiths. Even if they did not swing hammers and wield tongs, they probably handled customers or took payments from them.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: a lot of metalworking was done by women as late as Victorian times. Most farriers these days are women, for example -- fitting and nailing on horseshoes. Foundry work might be more difficult.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, but blacksmiths did a lot more than just shoeing horses in times when that profession was far more common. Including heavier and more difficult metalworking than shaping horseshoes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: once horseshoes became common/universal, they were a -big- part of a blacksmith's business. Up until cars, horses were everywhere.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, up till about 1910, which is about when cars really became numerous.
Horses were not only everywhere they also became huge problem. I recall you discussing the Great Manure Crisis of the 1880's and 1890's. Millions of tons of manure and millions of dead horses/mules were overwhelming the cities of America and Europe, with predictably bad public health problems.
Cars were a godsend.
Ad asrra! Sean
Sean: yup. Most of a car is recyclable, for example. You can cart horse manure out and use it as fertilizer, but that requires extensive organization and it's expensive. The Tokugawa Shoguns of Japan managed to do it with Edo, for example -- but they were compulsive organizers.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The Tokugawa were able to control their problems with manure because they did not shy from using coercion to have that manure carted away. Not possible given the limited gov't philosophy then prevalent in the US/UK/Europe.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that most steel produced in the US these days is recycled through electric furnaces -- over 100 million tons.
I like the "Note that..." way of presenting short comments.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Because recycling the steel used for cars, dishwashers, refrigerators, lawnmowers, etc., was quicker, cheaper, and easier than making such things from freshly smelted iron ore?
Ad astra! Sean
Metals have been recycled on a large scale from the beginnings of metallurgy. It is usually cheaper than finding more ore and extracting the metal.
In 1980 I did a tour of a plant near Montreal in which copper was recovered from scrap of various alloys of copper. The scrap was cast into plates which were then one electrode in an electrorefining setup. The copper ions went through an aqueous solution to deposit on the other electrode. Other metals went into a sludge on the bottom and that was further separated to collect fairly pure ingots of those metals.
Cheap hydroelectricity in Quebec makes that a good place for such activities.
Kaor, Jim!
I like that--very efficient!
Ad astra! Sean
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