Talk: The Mrem Go West

So this sounds like an intriguing concept. For the purposes of our little project here, it could very well be a giant pain in the ass. TR 20:47, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

Likewise for the two War World Series novels. That (along with laziness) is the reason I haven't attempted them aside from the one short story that HT actually did. ML4E 22:11, January 18, 2011 (UTC)

I'd assumed it was because they were out of print. On the plus side, since this is (apparently) a joint project from the get go rather than an author asking HT to join in, we won't have to do much outward linking. I hope. TR 01:52, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

Yes and no. I bought the two novels and one of the short story collections when they came out (in PB). The one short I have done up but I also knew the novels were a mix of characters created by the four authors. I also knew that two of HT's other shorts were included near verbatim in chapters of the first novel and have meant to read them first before trying to figure out what was his work. The TPL has them in the reference library so they can't be borrowed but they can be read there in the reading room. ML4E 23:31, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

This has been done before--by Harry Harrison, of all people, he of Stars and Stripes notoriety. [1]

I'd heard of that series. I was mildly intrigued, but after S&S....

Same. Turtle Fan 02:36, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

I read the first novel of the trilogy and it was okay but nothing exceptional so I didn't continue the series. It was a serious work and not humour like say HH's Stainless Steel Rat series. ML4E 23:31, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

From what I can tell, this new series does distinguish itself some, with the dinosaurs have magic and the mammal race being descended from cats rather than primates. TR 01:52, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

Magic, eh? So it's not a straight alternate natural history, then?

Harrison's mammals were rodents. As for sentient cats, I hope I'll be able to read it without thinking of Red Dwarf. Turtle Fan 02:36, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

We should coordinate closely with the Stirling wiki. Finally, that little AH authors wikia alliance we formed last summer will have a role of some substance to play.

Indeed. I shall leave a quick note with that fellow (I am sad to say I have't done much over there as of late; I've been trying to make the Flint wiki function, and Flint's works are largely available on-line.) TR 01:52, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

I haven't been over there at all. Much as I enjoyed getting started on the Lords of Creation stuff, I'm sad to say the prospect of actually drudging through the books looking for every stray reference to this and that, or worse to make thorough articles on the main characters' arcs, was too daunting. If it were on this Wiki, I'd be able to get myself motivated because I'm so invested in this place and would be hanging around here anyway. With a brand-new project, though. . . . Turtle Fan 02:36, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

By the way, I once read, by either Bakker or Gould, I can't remember which, that the genus Velociraptor was by far the best-positioned of all the dinos to evolve into a sentient species. I can't imagine them developing a culture that was anything but belligerent in the extreme. It will be interesting, anyway. Turtle Fan 00:28, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

I believe Harrison used that work as a basis for his Dino Sapiens. ML4E 23:31, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

You know, now that I think of it Star Trek did something similar, too. It was on Voyager. A lizardy scientist is pursuing the theory that his species originated on a planet very far away and migrated across the cosmos. He discovers the body of some poor redshirt who'd died a meaningless death months earlier and sees that their DNA is similar. (Of course, given how much interbreeding and whatnot went on in Star Trek, everyone's DNA was similar, but that's neither here nor there.) He tracks down our heroes, who look at his research and conclude that his people are descended from Hadrosaurus. They survived the K/T extinction in some remote pocket that wasn't affected, evolved into a sentient species, became technologically advanced, and abandoned Earth 20 million years ago, with seismic activity eventually obliterating every trace of their society. Then they hung out in the Delta Quadrant for 20 million years of continuous history but somehow never became anything more than a minor local Class II power. They also developed your typical fictional anti-science theocracy and made a dogma of the notion that they'd always been in the Delta Quadrant. When the dino doc brought our heroes in front of the Inquisition or whatever to give irrefutable proof of his theories, the Inquisition threatened to persecute him. He was prepared to suffer as a witness to truth so they moved on to threatening the Voyager crew, and he recanted for our heroes' sakes. Chakotay gave him a globe and told him not to lose hope that some day the truth would out.

Actually it bears only the vaguest of resemblances to this project. It was a pretty good episode, though. Turtle Fan 03:14, January 19, 2011 (UTC)

Link to on-line excerpt

Here. On the plus side, HT's contribution is the first chapter, so we can get a sense of what the whole thing is about, and how much extra work we may have to do. TR 19:09, June 24, 2011 (UTC)

Damn, it's not available for Nook or Kindle. If it were I could likely have downloaded the first chapter for free and had all I needed for our purposes. I don't feel like spending money on it, nor even the gift card I came into yesterday. Turtle Fan 01:01, August 5, 2011 (UTC)

Well, Turtledove's piece is still available on-line at Baen. I just haven't started any articles because I did want to see the whole book and find out how much Rum Tum Tugger...I mean Rantan Taggah and his group play out in the works that follow; i.e., are they protagonists throughout the whole collection, or are the subsequent stories about their descendants? I'll pop by the library. They are pretty good at getting books on order, although I'd only have it for two weeks, so I wouldn't be able to do gobs with it. And at least one of those stories would fit better at the Stirling wiki than here.

Rantan Taggah, eh? Well the case for a Musical Alliterations article just got that much stronger. (Actually we've got a few sections over there from musical theater. One of us will get around to splitting it off one of these days.) Turtle Fan 19:09, August 10, 2011 (UTC)

I will say that HT's contribution is sufficiently likable that I do want to read the rest of the book. Much like you TF, I just don't want to pay HC prices right now. Rather throw that money at SV in December. TR 17:14, August 10, 2011 (UTC)

I quite agree. Also I find that this project makes me feel like I'm somehow duty-bound to drop everything and read when a new HT novel comes out (which is what I used to do for pleasure back in the days of GW and AE and Col and Derlavai). If it weren't for this project--both the need to write articles and the fact that it puts me in contact with people with whom I can discuss the book and bounce criticisms off of--I probably would have stopped reading TWTPE after HW. Now, of course, I'm glad I didn't.

But the point is, yes, I'll be buying Supervolcano. Maybe they'll put it on Vine and I'll get another advance reader's edition. I kept waiting for them to do that with TBS, to no avail. Turtle Fan 19:09, August 10, 2011 (UTC)

AH or Fantasy?

I've started reading HT's chapter, and the farther in I go, the less sure I am that this is AH. You've got magic and mind control working, for starters; the Lishkash who's shaping up to be the main antagonist appears to be using sorcery quite reminiscent of what the Banished One used in the Scepter of Mercy stories, which reminded me that we need to get IFiMT figured out so we can add items again.

Fair point, although by itself, the appearance of magic in an AH isn't wholly unique. Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers had a few psychics, although I suppose that sort of thing could be hand-waved by the asteroids-hitting-the earth-causing-radioactive-mutants-with-psychic-powers. TR 20:44, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

I've watched enough Star Trek to accept that psionic abilities can occur through natural selection, or at least not to gag on the idea. I guess it's also possible that what's going on is that the Lishkash lords emit some sort of pheromone that affects their underlings in very specific ways. That could also explain why it doesn't work as well on Mrem and why it destroys their physical health (unless cruelty on the part of their slavers does the latter without any help). Feline physiology is different from saurian, so the cats don't have pheromone receptors which respond in the same way. (They shouldn't have such receptors at all, really, but maybe we can overlook that for the sake of having at least a half-logical explanation.) Turtle Fan 01:30, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

And then theres the geography: a lowlying area that's separated rrom the ocean by a thin strip of highground sees that barrier erode and the lowlands become an inland sea. The intro to the anthology says "Think of the Mediterranean," but it doesn't say that the sea is the Mediterranean as I had assumed it was; and they keep saying that the ocean is to the east and dry land (the Middle East, if we're stretching the metaphor) is to the west. Unless the cats' language has reversed our words for "east" and "west," we're talking about the mirror image of the Med, not the Med itself. (And a mirror image is reminiscent of Detina and Derlavai. Come to think of it, the premise at the opening is reminiscent of DitB. So again, we really do need to resolve IFiMT.) The intro to the collection says that cats became sentient because their world was in a solar system with few asteroids, which in light of the rest of it should not necessarily be construed to mean that the POD is our solar system having few asteroids.

That was a big tip-off. This is not AH--unless the geography is dramatically different, this isn't Earth. TR 20:44, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

It's not our map, anyway. The POD of the asteroid belt all but vanishing (or rather all but never forming) goes back way, way earlier than the formation of the continents as we know them. I don't think asteroid impacts have an appreciable effect on seismic activity. The absence of asteroids presumably means that their mass has been absorbed into one or another large celestial body--another planet is larger (Minerva?) or the Moon is. That would have an effect on tidal forces. Not sure whether that could make the map look fundamentally different to such a large extent.

That, or maybe whatever force played on our solar system and caused all the asteroids to be sucked up also reversed the direction of the Earth's rotation? Looking down on the Earth from some point well above the North Pole, we'll see the Earth rotating counterclockwise. If it were rotating clockwise, the sun would rise in the west and set in the east, as it does on Venus (or at least in The Sky People; not sure whether that has a basis in fact, but given how hard a lot of the science was in that one, I wouldn't doubt it). If that happened, whatever significance the ancients attached to the east would be attached to the west, and vice versa. So it might be the same Earth with the same map, but I would much rather call it a fantasy world. This is a hell of a lot of retcon, and until it gets a canonical reference Occam's Razor dictates we throw it out.

You are correct about Venus' direction of rotation. However, sucking up asteroids is unlikely to reverse a planet's rotation since there are many and coming from different directions so the effect of their collective impacts would tend to cancel out. However, an impact by one, planet sized asteroid (see creation of the Moon below) could do it if it came in a glancing blow against the direction of rotation. It is thought that this happened to Uranus giving it such an extreme tilt to its axis. Not sure if this is the reason for Venus' rotation but such a blow should have given it a large moon too, also in a retrograde orbit. ML4E 22:06, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

By the way, when the Earth first formed, didn't it include the mass that is now part of the moon? I seem to remember something about a much larger planet that had some huge-ass comet slam into it so hard that one seventh of its mass was thrown into space, accrued into an object that was so massive it took on a spherical shape itself, and entered orbit around the planet it used to belong to. Turtle Fan 01:30, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

The current favoured theory on the moon's creation has the Earth hit by a Mars size planet early in the Solar System's history. The impact both merged the two bodies and threw mass from both into space some of which remained in orbit forming a dense ring. This quickly (in astronomical terms, say a few thousands of years) coalesced into the Moon. ML4E 22:06, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

The biology confuses me, too. I assumed there was one species of dinosaur that had evolved sapience and felt no more kinship with non-intelligent dinosaurs than we do with other mammals--which can be quite a lot in the case of the dog or the horse or something like that, but we wouldn't necessarily "root" for any other mammal over any non-mammal: hold that thought. Instead it seems sort of like any number of species of dinos are more or less equally likely to give rise to intelligent specimens, a la that godawful early 90s sitcom.

I'm not clear on that part, either, aside from the idea that the dinosaurs/reptiles/whatever had longer to evolve than the mammals, as noted in the introy "Given tens of millions of extra years one of the descendants of the first reptiles would have reacted to their own fierce competitiveness by very slowly developing both their own kind of intelligence and more." TR 20:44, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

It very nearly happened with us given the inferred intelligence of Neanderthals. It may be referring to a group of closely related dinosaurs all becoming sapient. On the other hand, if they are distantly related then it seems unlikely to me. ML4E 22:06, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

There's reference to a "leatherwing" being intelligent, and the leatherwing appears to be some sort of descendant of Archaeopteryx. The main Liskash villain is definitely not from that line. Of the other dinosaur characters, descriptions tend toward the vague but there do seem to be several species involved which do not resemble one another terribly closely.

It puts me in mind of a group of Star Trek aliens called the Xindi. They were made up of six species: humanoids, lemur-like primates, cetaceans, reptiles, insects, and a species of avians that had gone extinct before the species was introduced. Look at any two of their genomes side by side and they would be quite close--barely beyond the possibility of cross-fertilization. I'm sure that could never happen in real life, but I was put in mind of it. Turtle Fan 02:02, September 8, 2011 (UTC)

Well, one of the descendants of the first mammals did that too. So did one of the descendants of the first vertebrates, and the first chordates, and the first bilaterians, and the first animals. It's not like you can go back and share that intelligence with your taxological cousins.

I think, though, we're going to have to accept the book driving a truck through that "They've had tens of millions of years to evolve" statement, especially since this book was written by a committee of authors. Turtle Fan 01:30, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

I don't see why the intelligent mammals are cats rather than humans, either. It would be quite interesting to see humans interact with intelligent dinosaurs. I suppose the cat is meant to give off some sort of exotic vibe. At the same time, the story is clearly going out of its way to make the cats the good guys, but truthfully I feel no more kinship to these intelligent cats than I do to intelligent dinosaurs. Whereas I would definitely root for humans over reptiles, at least right off the bat; over the course of the Worldwar timeline I came to prefer the Race to quite a few of the human governments opposing it. But humans get the benefit of the doubt in that context; cats, not so much.

Non-humans are more fantasy than humans? TR 20:44, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

Ah, but the book's already got non-humans. Just seems like they're adding another layer of "Look how different this world is!" for its own sake. Turtle Fan 01:30, September 7, 2011 (UTC)

The intro also annoyed me by its demonstration that it doesn't understand natural history. It suggests that humans needed to develop intelligence as a means of escaping predators, whereas cats, having no such need, would be unlikely to follow that route unless a much larger predator abounded. (And then it says that the Mrem evolved in the northern latitudes where the Lishkash didn't go, by the way.) Hominids were always omnivorous, but each of our ancestor species' primary ecological niche was predatory. Humans and our ancestors hung out near the top of the food chain. Notice for instance that both our eyes face in the same direction, a trait we share with species who have little need to scan the horizon for predators. When we're placed in a situation that calls for awareness of things beyond our narrow peripheral vision, such as when a teenager learns to drive, we need to be taught to notice things off to the side. By contrast, domesticated horses and cattle instinctively and continuously scan all around themselves when they're outdoors, no matter how many generations human farmers have been guaranteeing the safety of their pastures. Every book I've ever read or video I've ever seen reconstructing prehistoric lifestyles makes much of the fact that our intelligence was put to use in developing new hunting strategies (and very relevant here, the saber-tooth tiger went extinct because of an inability to compete with human hunters when the first humans crossed into North America) while simultaneously suggesting that when a maneater did show up, intelligence was of little use. Even today, if you were to find yourself at close quarters with a polar bear or kimodo dragon, outthinking them won't help you. Intelligence ultimately allowed us to build weapons to defeat our predators or modes of transportation to outrun them, but if every generation from 200,000 BC through say 1800 AD had depended on such things for survival, we would have been hunted to extinction eons ago. Turtle Fan 19:33, September 6, 2011 (UTC)

Got the book, Read HT's contribution

I borrowed the book from the library and read HT's section. I quite enjoyed it and intend to read the rest of the stories. I would classify it as Fantasy rather than AH although the setting and general situation is based on the Med. (See Down in the Bottomlands for an AH take and for the geological background.) However, there is a long history of using mundane settings as the basis for Fantasy. Middle Earth is based on European geography and that the story took place well before recorded history.

As for multiple sapient species of dinosaur, the impression I have is that other than the Lishkash, the rest have minds that can be read and manipulated but are not truly sapient. This is a fairly common trope for fantasy stories with mind-reading and SF stories with psionic powers. Animals have minds but aren't necessary as intelligent as humans (or elves, or dwarves, or whatever). For instance, the "leatherwing" seemed to me to be rather narrowly focused, not very intelligent, just a vicious predator with no higher mental functions of foresight or planning. ML4E 18:57, September 26, 2011 (UTC)

Novelty item

This collection is a fairly cute novelty item, basically having the characters of Cats: The Musical acting out an Edgar Rice Burroughs or Robert E. Howard story formula. But a novelty is all it is, as the stories quickly become mind-numbingly repetitious and the Manichaean character treatment of Good and Evil is glaringly one-dimensional. Until I looked it up yesterday, I hadn't realized there were further volumes in the series, and I have no particular desire to seek them out at the moment.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 09:12, July 20, 2019 (UTC)

Earlier start for shared universe?

Googling, it seems like the Mrem and possibly the Liskash originated in a Fawcett-helmed project called Lord of Cragsclaw way back in 1989. This seems to be out of print. I wonder if E:CotC is meant to be in the same continuity, or a complete reboot. The snippets I've been able to pick up suggest the latter. This may mean we have to overhaul the lit coms and other out of universe trivia here.Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 00:00, July 30, 2019 (UTC)

Relevant commentary: https://www.flayrah.com/3638/review-exiled-clan-claw-edited-bill-fawcett Matthew Babe Stevenson (talk) 00:06, July 30, 2019 (UTC)