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Bezig met laden... The People of the Wind (1973)door Poul Anderson
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Molto bello. Un'affascinante racconto un po' space opera (ci sono anche battaglie spaziali!!), un po' politica, un po' etologia umana/aliena e fusion, un po' sentimentale, un po' ambientalista e pacifista. Un'opera di grande respiro e grandi sentimenti che getta uno sguardo ottimista e romantico su di un futuro remoto e grandioso. In storie come questa si vede il valore di un grande scrittore. Altamente consigliato. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Onderdeel van de reeks(en)Onderdeel van de uitgeversreeks(en)Alpha science fiction (1979) Goldmann SF (0191) Is opgenomen inBevatPrijzen
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.9Literature English & Old English literatures English fiction Modern PeriodLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The People of the Wind is a densely-packed, swift-moving story of imperial and colonial ambitions playing out in a series of interstellar skirmishes collectively dignified with the title of war: the relatively newly-formed Terran Empire (dominated by humans) wishes to hedge off the expansion of the even more recently-formed Ythrian Domain (dominated by ornithoid "bird-men" called the Ythri; humans and Ythri are similar enough so that they can eat most of each others' native foods, although the Ythri are more vulnerable to radiation than humans are, while humans are more susceptible to heavy metal poisoning than the Ythri are [p. 93]; the two species cannot interbreed, although there are hints of occasional sexual encounters between them), while the human and Ythri colonists of the world named Avalon (which gets a prominent mention in the stories collected in The Earth Book of Stormgate) would rather be independent. Anderson has an absurdly large cast of characters for such a brief novel: while his mission statement for this novel may be inferred by the book's dedication ("To Edmond Hamilton and Leigh Brackett with thanks for many years of adventure"), Anderson usually wasn't satisfied with writing "mere" adventure tales, and his intent here is obviously greater than producing a "mere" space opera or swords & planets romp; unfortunately, his high-minded intentions are undermined by a lack of believable character development and by a, at best, tin-eared disregard for the horror and seriousness of rape.
For all the sober reflections on the ethicality of an interstellar empire versus a colony breaking away from its parent state (or states, in the case of Avalon, as its society is a blend of human and Ythrian), or the morality of war and what the moral distinctions are, if any, between standard warfare (up to and including particle beam weaponry, and implicitly including chemical warfare) and nuclear warfare, The People of the Wind suffers from one of its characters, Chris Holm (Ythrian name: Arinnian), being an exceptional prig, and from Anderson's cack-handed treatment of another character's rape.
The character in question, Eyath, is an Ythrian; Anderson stacks the deck by saying that the Ythri, while humanoid in all important respects, are enough like their bird-like ancestors that they don't share humans' sexuality: to wit, Ythrian females are not theoretically receptive to sex at all times, but rather go into estrus, during which period they emit pheromones that Ythrian males are able to detect and track from many miles away. More to the point, the sexual functionality of Ythrian males is wholly dependent upon the receptivity of Ythrian females -- which doesn't preclude Ythrian males shipping off to war from finding a few abnormal, "always ready" Ythrian females, usually functioning as de facto prostitutes, to "party" with before boarding their spaceships. (Given that this is a work of a member of the last generation of classic science fiction authors, it should come as no surprise that Anderson doesn't posit the existence of homosexuality in the Ythri, considering that he scarcely acknowledged its existence in humans.)
Early in the book, the wannabe Ythrian, the human Chris Holm (Ythrian name: Arinnian), is discomfited by what his galemate (roughly akin to the human concept of "blood brother," "galemate" denotes an unusually close friendship between two Ythri and, in mixed choths or tribal groups, between a human and an Ythrian; the choth that Arinnian and Eyath belong to is Stormgate, which is a rather conservative one, though not, one feels, as conservative as Arinnian comes off as; one suspects that he's trying to be "more Catholic than the pope" in a vain attempt to "go bird") Eyath tells him about her attraction to a stand-up Ythrian named Vodan:
Later, news of Vodan's death shocks Eyath into premature estrus (recall the seldom-discussed phenomenon of "funeral sex," i.e., some people having sex immediately after a funeral, either with their partners or with a one-night stand, in order to shake the grim and sad feelings that a funeral inspires), which is supposedly at least partly what inspires an atavistic Ythrian named Draun to pursue and rape Eyath. It's hard to avoid the suspicion that Anderson is channeling his thoughts on human rape into his ornithoid extraterrestrials; he even goes so far as to have a human female character, Tabitha Falkayn (a descendant of David Falkayn, who at the time of this book has been dead for centuries; p. 18; p. 30), defend Draun by telling Chris/Arinnian, "'[T]hey couldn't help themselves. Neither could....Shock and grief brought on premature ovulation, and then he chanced by ---'" (p. 141). When Chris/Arinnian calls Draun on the videophone to confront him, Anderson puts the nastily dismissive and hoary arguments deployed by human males the world over against rape into Draun's mouth:
Anderson has Draun muddy the waters by introducing a bit of species envy, this time by an Ythrian for human male capabilities:
In short, Eyath's rape is ultimately dismissed by a "She asked for it," a disgusting attitude perhaps most commonly reported of late in India, but by no means alien to the U.S. That Anderson attempts to justify this dismissal by a bit of made-to-order xenobiology -- It's the females who control sex! Sex just doesn't happen unless the females want it! -- makes one suspect Anderson of having similarly retrograde attitudes towards rape among humans ("Just get over it"), much as one is apt to suspect Robert A. Heinlein when he brings the subject up in his late novel Friday.
Anderson's presentation and "resolution" of this incident is the biggest flaw in The People of the Wind; but the frankly unbelievable character "growth" that he tacks on at the end also cheapens the ideas that Anderson was able to successfully present here (including a rather neat snookering of the invading Terran forces that the Avalonians were able to perpetrate), as does an absurdity that Anderson should have been too intelligent to let slip through: the Terran admiral in charge of the punitive expedition against the Ythrian Domain and Avalon tells representatives of those polities: "'The truth is, you're up against Imperial Terra, which thinks in terms of centuries and reigns over thousands of planets'" (p. 116). That a human government, any human government, is capable of planning centuries into the future isn't merely a trope of science fantasy (forget "fiction"); it's a bona fide opium pipe dream. It also flies in the face of everything that Anderson wrote in previous and subsequent installments (some of the stories that fall earlier in the series' chronology were actually published after The People of the Wind) of his Polesotechnic League series, where the human governments were scarcely capable of planning to the end of the current calendar year.
One of the highpoints of The People of the Wind comes in a dialogue between Daniel Holm, at this point the Marchwarden of the Lauren System, and his son Chris (Arinnian), a little over halfway through the book; Holm senior says:
Anderson here presents a scientific basis for regarding one's homeland with the same level and type of reverence shown by, say, Amerindian tribes, which is a lot more palatable than his half-assed explication of rape. If you can forgive or forget the latter, then you might derive a few hours' worth of pleasant diversion from The People of the Wind. ( )