"Everard was harking back, gazing forward, abruptly hound-eager, aware that what he needed was not surcease but the completion of the hunt."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part One, 1987 A.D., p. 8.
"Most of [Everard] stood in a wind down which blew the scent of tiger ... man-eater." (Part Two, 1987 A.D., p. 75)
"...probably, down underneath, the carnivore which had been asleep in [Flandry] these past three years had roused, pricked up its ears, snuffed game scent on a night breeze."
-Poul Anderson, A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 339-606 AT III, p. 382.
I have reread these works so often that eventually these passages resonated. Everard hunts down the last Exaltationists and Flandry follows a metaphorical scent to Aycharaych's home planet.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Writers so often use animal metaphors of the kind you listed that it's easy to either overlook them or dismiss them as empty cliches. But I like them, once they were pointed out to me. When used with care they add color and depth to stories.
Sean
This is true. And humans were a hunting species for a very long time -- since before we became human or fully sapient, in fact. More specifically we were social predators; a lot of our default psychological mechanisms --
the tendency to form very tight emotional bonds among groups who share dangers, for instance -- mostly make sense in this context.
There's a passage in Anderson (I think in "The Rebel Worlds") where a nonhuman in the Imperial Navy remarks to Flandry that in groups humans often show courage beyond the bounds of madness, but crumble when alone and knowing nobody will tell their comrades how they died.
Flandry remarks that humans are descended from an animal that hunted in packs; the nonhuman answers that he has a point, but surely a sapient being can overcome instinct, particularly if he knows how it operates.
Humans have instincts, but not in quite the same way as, for example, dogs (an animal we closely resemble in many respects).
A dog has a territorial instinct; but it applies to actual -territory-.
A human can feel territorial about territory in terms of their house and garden, in terms of the "fictive kinship" of the nation-state, or for something completely abstract like a religious/ideological system.
The way our reasoning mind works also bears the marks of our ancestry. For example, humans find patterns -- we do it so compulsively that we find them even if they're not there. Likewise, we evolved to "model other minds" and determine patterns of intentionality.
This is very important for a social animal, but we take it to such lengths that we see intentionality everywhere and find the concept of things "just happening" hard to believe on an emotional level.
This explains the prevalence of animism.
Mr Stirling,
The other day I spoke to a friend who "liked" the idea that, between lives, we decide what we need to learn and therefore what we need to experience in the next life. I told him that there are two kinds of order: the one that we find and the one that we imagine. People invent stories to make sense of their lives.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree, the fact humans were hunters for such a long time makes it natural to use such metaphors.
I remember the incident you cited from THE REBEL WORLDS. I think it is true, that humans find it easier to show courage when in groups. And, yes, it would be the ideal for sapient to overcome instincts when they become destructive. Btw, this was Admiral McCormac, not Flandry, who was recalling what a Wodenite had said to him years before.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And one common way for humans to find patterns in places where they are not truly there is the Moon. Many of us like to imagine the markings on the Moon as showing a face.
Sean
Ah, you're right. I think that courage in a group is easier because it's being reinforced. Standing alone requires a different sort of grit.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree. And not all of us will have that kind of grit, to show courage when alone.
Sean
All:
In Andre Norton's *The Beast Master*, the hero realizes that his adversary isn't human, but a surgically-disguised agent of the Xik extraterrestrials who nuked Earth into sterility.
Remembering that to Xiks, being part of a group of comrades is EVEN MORE IMPORTANT than it is to humans, he taunts the alien with the fact that he's now ISOLATED on a human-held planet, "one among the many who hate you," his fellow agents having accidentally blown themselves up. This drives the Xik over the edge into irrationality and makes him easier to defeat.
When I told a friend about this, nearly four decades ago, she was troubled by the "cruelty" of mocking the alien's desperation that way.
Kaor, DAVID!
Cool, this interesting use of PSYCHOLOGY to defeat an enemy agent. I'm reminded of how Flandry used psychology to manipulate the Ardazirho in WE CLAIM THESE STARS.
And I don't agree with your old friend! This disguished Xik was an ENEMY, from a race ruthless to apparently try wiping out the human race. The human hero was RIGHT to use all means possible to defeat the Xik, including psychological pressures.
Sean
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