Heights And Depths

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003).

(The image shows Galveston.)

The higher we are the further we can fall. CS Lewis' tutor rejected "demonic" as a description of war time enemy atrocities on the ground that demons are mythical, then rejected "bestial" on the ground that no beasts act thus. The only adjective left was "human."

However, in Stirling's story, North American savages are on the verge of losing even their humanity. Hunting each other for food, they have no social group larger than the extended family and barely retain fire or language. Inbreeding and savagery are making them physically distinct: no chins; sloping foreheads; horribly scarred faces; huge broad noses; narrow eyes; heavy brows and shoulders; long thick arms; broad feet. A visiting Imperial, Eric King, has to ask what they are. From a distance they looked like men...

If even one generation fails to transmit language to its children, then surely the degeneration to animality will be complete? How is this averted? Russian Imperialists, themselves practicing ritualized cannibalism, organize, train, equip and arm the savages to wage war against their civilized neighbors while remaining cannibals! Stirling imagines thoroughly evil villains for his Angrezi Raj timeline.

King has to acknowledge that technically the change among the savages is for the better because they are now living a little more like human beings and less like mad beasts (pp. 129-130). I would add that, although they have become more dangerous, they also now have the potential for greater good. Stirling continues Wells', Stapledon's and Anderson's discussions of evolution and devolution.

Someone commented that the language in "Shikari..." was difficult but I have not found it so. Mr Stirling, please write more about the Angrezi Raj!

Trust

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

I think that the secular bases of morality are as follows:

we were naturally selected to help others either because they bear the same genes or because they might help us in return and we experience this motivation as moral obligation, not as calculating self-interest, which is what it sounds like when expressed in biological terms;

as members of a social species, we have collective interests, like speaking a common language, that transcend a simplistic selfishness-altruism dichotomy.

It follows that lists of commandments and precepts are formulations of an evolved morality, not divine instructions. However, could humanity lose its moral basis?

"When men hunted each other to eat, there could be no trust, and trust was what let even the wildest men work together. Usually man-eaters had no groupings larger than an extended family, and often they barely retained the use of speech and fire. Human beings were not meant to live like that..." (pp. 118-119)

Loss of speech would be loss of humanity. In Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men, Venerian human beings artificially adapted in haste to colonize Neptune spread across the Neptunian surface but degenerated into animality, one species retaining the custom of gathering in a circle to hear a single individual howl. Later, quadrupeds migrating into an area dense with tall plants began to walk upright, thus freeing forelimbs for manipulation and growing new fingers above the vestigial digits of their ancestors.

Stirling's cannibals have not degenerated that far yet but, if they lose speech entirely, then they will no longer be human.

Worlds And Words

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

Science fiction writers show words changing their meanings in the future. In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, Jack Havig, time traveling to his future, meets a young woman who, when asked what she does with her time, replies that she jokes a lot. An amateur comedienne? However, when she and he share a picnic with no one else present, she announces that she had figured they could joke after eating but why not before and after?

(Addendum, 15 Mar: Also highly relevant is Anderson's "A Tragedy of Errors." See comments.)

In Neil Gaiman's sequel to Alan Moore's Miracleman, "London" means an event as "Hiroshima" does for us and "Kidding" has become a swear word because of what the Kid did in London. (Alan Moore had asked, "What would someone with Superman's strength and speed but not his scruples do?" He then answered this question with extremely detailed instructions to a comic strip artist.)

In SM Stirling's "Shikari in Galveston," a Bengali trader surprises us by telling Eric King that the local savages "'...are a clean people...'" (p. 80) Clean? King has just complained of sweat, squalor, smoke, sewage and stink. However, the trader's use of the word "clean" does not refer to hygiene. He spells it out:

"'From the time of the Fall.'" (ibid.)

King understands:

"King nodded...that was one of the fundamental distinctions in the modern world, between those whose ancestors had eaten men in the terrible years after the hammer from the skies struck, and those who hadn't. The only more fundamental one was between those who still did, and the rest of humanity." (ibid.)

And I am certain that the use of the word "clean" would be extended in precisely this way in those circumstances.

Tomorrow there will be a family outing for Mothers' Day (we have two mothers in the household) so maybe not much time for posting. Before turning in this evening, I have had to stop reading Stieg Larsson in order to post and must now stop posting in order to watch Smallville. Retirement, as expected, is an endless choice between enjoyable activities.

A World That Wasn't

SM Stirling, "Shikari in Galveston" IN Worlds That Weren't (New York, 2003), pp. 63-148.

In fiction, there are three kinds of history: past, future and alternative. Much of Poul Anderson's fiction is set in the past or the future with a smaller number of works set in alternative timelines, including one series with magical instead of scientific technology in the twentieth century.

Later science fiction writers, Harry Turtledove and SM Stirling, have specialized in the third kind of history, each generating several lengthy series set in divergent timelines. Worlds That Weren't is an anthology of original alternative history stories by four different authors. SM Stirling comments in his afterword, pp. 149-152, that "Alternative history has many uses..." (p. 149) and that one such use is to restore the terra incognita that our twentieth century banished from Earth and even from Mars and Venus. An even more fundamental use is to remind us that our timeline, in which an asteroid killed the dinosaurs but no such catastrophe has as yet killed humanity, is just one of many possibilities.

We know of Stirling's Angrezi Raj timeline from 1878, the point of divergence, to 2025. In "Shikari in Galveston," Eric King and Ranjit Singh, both of the Peshawar Lancers, are in North America during the reign of Queen-Empress Elizabeth II (1989-2005). In The Peshawar Lancers, their sons, Athelstane King and Narayan Singh, also both of the Peshawar Lancers, are in India at the end of the reign of King-Emperor John II (2005-2025) and at the beginning of the reign of King-Emperor Charles III (2025- ). Narayan, but not Eric, survives into the later narrative. Eric never suspects that his daughter, Athelstane's sister, will become Queen-Empress.

These two works, set in different continents, are separated by a generation and thus are well on their way towards becoming a fictitious history. I have yet to read "Shikari..." to its conclusion - but it must compete for reading time since I have been drawn back into Stieg Larsson's trilogy!