review of Mack Reynolds with Dean Ing's The Other Time by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 4, 2023
This is something like the 23rd Reynolds novel Ireview of Mack Reynolds with Dean Ing's The Other Time by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 4, 2023
This is something like the 23rd Reynolds novel I've read & reviewed. I keep stressing how much I like Reynolds, both as an entertaining writer & as someone who manages to fit in political history of obscure substance. Several of his bks that I've read have been finished post-Reynolds-mortem by other writers. Ing is possibly the most prolific of these. "A MESSAGE TO THE READER" from Jim Baen explains this:
"Before his death in 1983 after a long illness, Mack Reynolds had taken several novels to first-draft stage and then, perhaps driven by a sense of mortal urgency, gone on to the next. When it became clear that Mack would be unable to bring them to completion, I, with Mack's and later his estate's approval, commissioned Dean Ing to take the entire group to a fully polished state. Dean's purpose has not been to collaborate posthumously, but to finish them as exactly as Mack Reynolds writing at the utter top of his form would have done.
"We believe that Dean has succeeded to an almost uncanny degree. For any writer, and particularly one of Ing's stature, to so subordinate his own authorial personality is a remarkable achievement." - p -i
& I agree. This was a great Reynolds novel. Thank you, Dean Ing, for making sure it reached this printable form.
"Assistant Professor Donald Fielding had taken his doctorate in ethnology and was a specialist in Mexican cultures." - p 2
While in an unpopulated area of Mexico he goes back in time w/o knowing it & for no explained reason. When he encounters other people their 'primitiveness' is strange but why wd he think he'd gone back in time? Eventually, he's taken captive by Spanish gold hunters. He still hasn't figured out that he's gone back in time.
"They passed an open area containing a market. It seemed literally to overflow with produce. Largely, it was similar to a score of other Mexican town markets Don had witnessed in his time, though, strangely, some of the products he would have expected were not evident. Bread, for instance, or chickens; nor, for that matter, did he spot either beef or pork in the section devoted to meats. And where were the inevitable ice-cream vendors? Whoever heard of a Mexican market without ice-cream vendors? And, now that he thought about it, there were no refreshment stands selling beer." - p 15
But, then, the fated moment came.
"Instead, even as he turned to follow young Sandoval, he said to Fray Olmedo, "Padre, could you tell me the exact date?"
"The priest said, "Why, it is the tenth of August, in the year of Out Lord, 1519."
""I was afraid you'd say something like that," Don Fielding said emptily." - p 21
"As a boy he had read the usual time travel classics such as Wells's The Time Machine and Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, and he vaguely remembered a movie he had seen revived on television entitled Berkeley Square" - p 29
YAY! I'm familiar w/ all 3. &, yes, this is probably most akin to the Twain novel.
Fielding escapes the greedy clutches of the invaders & seeks help from the natives. In the process he finds himself in the awkward position of delicately negotiating his way thru religions.
"Trying to keep his own viewpoint as an agnostic neutral, Don Fielding expressed as best he could in Nahuatl the Christian belief. It wasn't as difficult as he expected to get the fundamentals over to the Indian. In Tenochtitlan, too, they had gods who were born of virgins and native gods also had more than one aspect. The Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, three, still only one, did not bewilder Cuauhtemoc.
""But what are your beliefs, Don Fielding?" the Indian asked, after assimilating what he had heard.
"How did you explain the agnostic viewpoint to a superstitious native?
"Don said, seeking out his words carefully, "Man is the only thinking animal."" - p 89
""Do not let Xochitl hear such things from your lips when we arrive in Tenochtitlan." The Indian chuckled deprecation.
""Xochitl? Who is he?"
""The High Priest of Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God, who is the chief god of the Tenochas. Speak thus and you will wind up on the altar, your heart torn from your chest. It is said to be a worthy way to die, however, I personally have never so regarded it though tell no priest I said so." The other laughed his deprecation again." - p 90
Coincidentally, my friend Brian Gentry had recently told me that hummingbirds are very violent & that that was why there was a Hummingbird God b/c he was a god of warriors.
"Motechzoma said, "Xochitl, the Quequetzalcoa."
"So this was the High Priest of Huitzilopochtli, the Hummingbird God, the god of war of the Tenochas.
"His eyes burned and he screamed, "Sacrifice him to the gods!"" - pp 113-114
The Other Time is multi-layered in what makes it interesting for me, its look at the culture of the time & place is fascinating. Take, e.g., the sanitation.
"He pointed out another canoe, laden down with what he knew not, and asked Cuauhtemoc about it.
"The young Indian laughed and explained that the public latrines were unloaded into these canoes and the contents taken over to the mainland to be used as fertilizer. It made sense. If they'd dumped their sewage into the canals, they'd not only have a horrible stench in short order but possibly an epidemic as well." - p 107
Fielding tries to explain the ulterior motives of the conquistidores to Cuauhtemoc.
""So that they can force you to work the mines, build houses and temples for them, till the soil so that they themselves can live lives of plenty without need to labor."
"The Indian was horrified, "But that is criminal!"
"Don groaned inwardly. How did you, even an anthropologist, describe class-divided society to a primitive communist? Above all, how do you explain that it led to progress? That to have scientists, scholars, and artists, you had to have a leisure class that had the time to create. Yes, the present-day Spain produced freebooters such as Cortes and Alvarado, but it also produced Cervantes and in due time Goya, Velazques, El Greco, and Murilio. Would Leonardo da Vinci ever have done his work if he'd had to put in ten or twelve hours a day tilling a field? Would Michaelangelo?" - p 161
I've had to work most of my adult life to pay my bills & otherwise survive but I've still managed to be enormously prolific as a creative person . If I were growing my own food & not food for others I don't think I'd have to toil a field for ten or twelve hours a day. Still, the point is taken.
Fielding leads the Tenochas against Cortes & his soldiers, using his historical knowledge & his 20th century weaponry & warfare savvy to give tham an advantage they wdn't've otherwise had. All the while he worries about the "Grandfather Paradox" of time travel but decides to do it anyway. The 'inevitable' misperception of who he is follows.
"He has led us in defense against the devils from across the seas. He foresees the future, correctly as all know. He can bring fire from his fingertips. It is the year One Reed. Would you fly, then, in the face of our returned Lord, Quetzalcoatl?"" - p 221
Once committed, Fielding goes all the way, abolishes human sacrifice, & establishes a new republic.
"He said, "By tomorrow morning, I want every pochteca in Tenochtitlan on the roads. You will go as traders, as always, but you will also be ambassadors of the Aztec Republic. Everywhere you go, you will explain that there are to be no more raids on their cities and no more tribute, ever, if they join the new Mexico, the Aztec Republic. Each city that wishes to join must immediately elect its two senators and its representatives from each of its clans and send them to Tenochtitlan for out first . . . our first congress.["]" - pp 277-278
What a spectacular movie this story wd make! What a great series of sequels cd be made to continue it!! ...more
This is subtitled "A Tale of Mystery and Archaeological Theory". The basic idea is that the author teaches about archeological theory w/in the context of a mystery novel. That appealed to me. By the end, I think the mystery suffered more than the theory but I suspect that many nuances of the theory were lost in the process too. Nonetheless, I enjoyed it & if 'didactic crime fiction' became an established genre I'd probably read more.
""Not a fan of ecofeminist archeology, Sean?" she goaded. "OK, I'm sortof starting to snooze myself. But let's be unobtrusive because the speaker's a friend of mine."
"They got up and shuffled as quietly as they could along the row of chairs to the side aisle.
""I can see its appeal, though," he continued when they were out of the meeting room. "You know—the idea that the Neolithic in south-eastern Europe was a peaceful, egalitarian. . . ."
"". . . matriarchal, godess-worshipping era. Yes, it has a certain appeal to me, too. But, well . . ." His colleague paused with a lopsided half smile.
""Yeah, I know what you're going to say, Doctor Green: there's just not much evidence that it ever happened."" - p 2
This bk features fairly frequent illustrations that are, yes, illustrative of ideas presented. The 1st of these illustrations is, indeed, labelled: ""ROLL CALL": Some of the Ideas presented in this Book" (p 4) & it has clip art of what's vaguely depictive of a toilet-paper dispenser w/ a hand pulling down 2 or 3 tissues w/ txt on them. The last of these txts reads:
"Chap. 9. The Postmodern Non-Method PoMos don't agree on the questions Or if there ARE any questions
These illustrations add considerably to the appeal of the bk for me.
""Stop me if you've heard this one, but science is nothing more than a way of organizing what you know about a subject so that you can understand it better. If you're going to use the scientific method, you have to put all your assumptions on the table, be explicit about the relationship between what you want to know and your method for finding it out, and be willing to be wrong. The scientific method involves starting out with an idea about why something is the way it is—a theory. Then you come up with a number of plausible explanations or hypotheses that you can apply to the facts of the case to see which fit and which don't."" - p 9
Note that there's nothing in there that claims the one has to have a particular sanctified training in order to embark upon this process. Instead, it's just common-sensical.
""Laws like the National Environmental Policy Act and the National Historic Preservation Act forced developers who needed federal money or approval to identify sites that might be affected by their project, to evaluate them—that is, to see if they were important enough to be saved or studied further—and to dig important sites that couldn't be avoided."
"Sean laughed out loud. "Yeah. I've heard NHPA called the National Archeologists Full Employment Act."
""Well, it certainly increased the demand for archaeologists. I once read that over 90 percent of archaeologists in the United States work in the C.R.M. field."
"C.R.M. industry," he corrected. "The commercial archeology firms even have their own trade association to look after their interests in Washington." - pp 18-19
"Sean rolled the first of the pebbles over in his hand. The stone was crisscrossed with veins of some white material that could have been quartz. It was harder than the encasing matrix and had not eroded as rapidly, leaving a delicate tracery of milky lines. In frustration, Claude jabbed at it with a long finger.
""There, look. Don't you see the old man with the beard? And that looks like a horse."
"Each stone, according to Sean's companion, showed scenes of mythical creatures, women with flowing hair, or armed warriors. They were, he was certain, evidence of a lost civilization." - p 21
Whether the author, Praetzellis, was familiar w/ Richard Shaver whn he wrote this I don't know. To many of us, Shaver's ideas wd be evoked. I recommend my movie that touches on Shaver's idea, Backwards Masking in Rocks available here: https://archive.org/details/backwards... .
"And so it was that the pair arrived at the imposing wrought-iron gate and graveled driveway of the New Magick Retreat Center—or the Summerfield School as the chipped and blistered sign had announced for the last sixty years." - p 33
I have no idea whether it's common knowledge or knowledge most circulated in occult subcultures that "Magick", so spelled, is intended to be differentiated from "Stage Magic" - meaning that it's meant to refer to occult forces rather than tricks.
""You mean, like the New Archeology?" asked Sean through a mouthful of bread and cheese.
""You've heard of it?" She sounded surprised.
""Hey! I didn't sleep through all my eight o'clock classes."
""Just some of them, huh? OK then, Dr. Science, tell me all about it."
""Weeeell," began Sean, suddenly deciding that his shoelace needed tying. "I guess this guy Lewis Binford thought it all up in 1962."
""Oh, is that right?" asked his aunt in a tone that intimated otherwise." - p 37
""Mostly that they were dissatisfied with the direction the field had been going. What people like Taylor and the Binfords did was to get the field fired up with the idea that it was possible to create an anthropology of the past. That archeologists didn't and shouldn't be satisfied with knowing what happened in the past, they should ask . . ." She waited expectantly.
""Er . . . why it happened?" suggested Sean tentatively." - p 46
"Binford noticed that small fragments of bone accumulated in a "drop zone" around the workers, while they threw larger pieces either in front or behind them into what he called a "toss zone." Working on the assumption that people in the past had similar habits, the intrepid archeologist used this information to interpret the distribution of artifacts around 15,000-year-old fire hearths at an archeological site in Pincevent, France." - p 49
Thank goodness there's some humor in this novel (Thank you, Goodness). Even inanimate objects get a chuckle in here & there.
"She seized the stick and announced in a mixture of surprise and consternation, "You're a goddamn photographic scale." Wisely, the stick made no response, and its restraint was rewarded by being tucked under the arm of its captor, who continued to run in the same direction.
"Now, it doesn't take a New Archeologist applying the hypothetico-deductive method to predict that where there's an archeological scale, there's an archeological site not too far away. Such was Hannah's expectation, and it was confirmed after a couple of minutes of running." - p 54
"Alasdair offered vaguely. "Every indication is that it's from the Neolithic. Could be as much as five or seven thousand years old."
""Post-Bandkeramik Period, then," said his companion quietly. But Alasdair, in full lecture mode, didn't seem to hear this scholarly aside.
""The European Neolithic," he continued, "is the period when societies made an increasing use of domesticated crops and livestock, with a concomitant drop in emphasis on wild resources." - p 57
Yes, you've detected aright: there's some tension & there's some pomposity, there might even be some sexism against men perpetrated by the author as a way of staying on the good side of women bullies.
""That jerk," she growled, and Sean recoiled almost physically at the woman's vehement tone. "He has no idea what this site is about. Did you know he's only a second year grad student? The moron couldn't dig his way out of a kitty litter box. There're plenty of people on this site who've had far more field experience than him. But the Lord High Tuliver likes his fancy manners because they impress that capitalist running dog who claims to own this site. It's frikkin' feudal, the way he runs things here."" - pp 63-64
But there's also some female-male romance so the man-hating isn't 100%.
""I always come here at this time. After the archeologists have gone home," she explained gently. "This is a holy place for us. Come on, I'll show you."
""Us?"
""The Children of Odin."" - p 65
"It had briefly occurred to him to mention the alternative interpretations of the so-called goddess images: like Alice Kehoe's suggestions that some of the Upper Paleolithic carvings that archeologists and others routinely say are breasts could just as easily be male genitalia. Especially if you suspend them using the holes that are bored in one end. Or the idea that rotund figures like the famous Venus of Willendorf may have been made by women themselves recording the stages of pregnancy. Realizing that absolute honesty only gets you so far in a romantic relationship, Sean decided to keep his ideas to himself." - p 67
Given that I don't know shit from shinola about archeology [&, yes, I'm deliberately mutating some sayings here] I was bound to learn a fair amt from this bk, wch I enjoyed. E.G.: I didn't know about band societies.
"["]Band societies move around a lot. They make temporary settlements wherever they go, following the food resources, but they don't wander aimlessly. This month, they may be taking advantage of a fish run, and next they'll be harvesting seeds. From what social anthropologists tell us, their social organization is quite egalitarian. There's no individual that every member of the band looks up to as the boss. If there's a job to be done that needs skilled organization—like a fishing trip—the group chooses someone who is respected for that particular skill. But authority is quite fleeting: running the show today doesn't give you command tomorrow." - p 71
That seems sensible to me.. &, yet, I've found that in situations where I abnegated my own authority in favor of having a new person be the temporary expert that there's usually, if not always, a type of person who immediately tries to take advantage of the situation to take over the whole shebang.
Here's more useful terminology that I learned:
"The SCIENTIST classifies animals by their biological attributes: mammals have hair, birds grow feathers, and fish breathe with gills. Anthropologists call these ETIC categories, to denote distinctions that are made by the scientific observer.
"Yet, the typical observant Jew sees the same beasts quite differently. Using rules derived from the Hebrew Bible and other religious sources, he divides them into kosher and treyfe—animals that may be eaten and those that may not. Distinctions like these, which are used by people in a specific social or cultural context, are called EMIC categories." - p 81
""What this comes down to," accepting an orange segment from Claude, "is that you can't ask why people carry out a certain ritual or cultural practice and expect a single cut-and-dried answer that you can put in a bottle on the shelf and label it 'the one truth'. Ask a materialist like Alasdair and he's going to emphasize the social effects of carrying out the practice—an etic explanation. Ask a culturalist like me and I'm going to give an emic answer and tell you what the ritual means to the people themselves.["]" - p 84
Those rare people who have some idea of what my own thoughts are on similar matters (do you exist?!) might realize that this reinforces the position of my bk entitled THE SCIENCE (volume 1) ( http://idioideo.pleintekst.nl/Book202... ). In other words, it's my opinion that there is no such thing as "THE SCIENCE" in the sense of one monolithic position taken by all scientists regarding any particular subject under study. There will always be differences of opinion based on a wide variety of data accepted as flawless & a wide variety of ways of interpreting that data, etc..
""The information on this site belongs to the people," expounded Terry. "It's part of everyone's history. At least, everyone in North America. It's not right that some moron can tell us how we should be doing our job just because he happens to own the land. No one can own the past," she asserted passionately, "it's not a commodity to be bought and sold. It's just too important.["]"
[..]
""The scrolls were kept secret for decades and only a few people were allowed to see them, to study them. Well, it's the same thing here. Power and money are all that's important. The capitalists who have it get to decide what's right and wrong, to hold back scientific investigation, and to decide what the people get to hear."" - p 91
Indeed.
""So you agree with authors who've started to give their books names like An Archaeology of Early American Life, which a fewyears ago would have been The Archaeology . . . ?"
""Of course," he insisted with a wave of the hand. "The implication here is that the author does not have the final word on the subject and the data may be interpreted differently by another. Discussion and change are the bases of science, even social science." Now, to be strictly accurate, Tuliver was willing to spout these liberal ideas and even to believe them in a general sort of way. Except, of course, when it came to his own work." - p 113
Wch brings me back to THE SCIENCE again & its nonexistence as a single unshakeable truth. What's different now, in 2023, in contrast to the 2000 when this bk was copyrighted is that it's no longer 'liberal' to espouse such an open-mindedness, at least in relation to the plandemic, any objections to the 'liberal' mass media propaganda regarding that one has been subjected to severely vicious lockstep behaviors.
"ÇATALHöYüK is a really nifty 7,000- 8,000-year-old Neolithic town site in Turkey that is being excavated by an international team. The site is made up of many contiguous buildings, which were entered through holes in the roof. While many archeologists jealously guard their data until they have time to publish, the ÇATALHöYüK Web page allows access to excavators' field notes so that everyone with an Internet connection may make use of and reinterpret the data. The Web page also contains an open discusssion forum where participants are encouraged to question, laud, and disagree with the archeologists' interpretations." - p 114
Politics has been running thru this already but now we reach the Marxist influence:
"The idea that archeologists should think about the POLITICAL implications of their work got a lot of people thinking that the field should have SOCIAL goals, rather than being a pastime for intellectuals. And that led to some of the approaches that we call POST-PROCESSUALIST." - p 122
One of the sections that's most likely to reach a large readership w/ its evocation is one where International Geographic comes to the dig site & has the crew dress up in fake neolithic garb in order to do a dramatic reenactment of something that might not've happened in the 1st place. It seems inevitable, & intentional on the author's part, that International Geographic will be interpreted as a stand-in for National Geographic, a magazine whose photography has been admired by just about everyone & her pet frog's legless uncle.
""Well, in my humble opinion, Dr. Tuliver should never have approved this . . . this charade," said Alasdair peevishly. His sackcloth jerkin and leggings itched, and the strip of leather he had been give for a belt kept getting loose, threatening to send his pants to the ground. It was incredible that Tuliver would have agreed to them dressing up like Neolithic peasants for that photographer. And it was shocking that a magazine like International Geographic would go in for this sort of playacting." - p 128
Gosh, am I at the Epilogue already?
"Thus, we are left with the kind of morally equivocal ending that will no doubt be abhorrent to television evangelists and others with little tolerance of ambiguity of any sort.
"They are the kind of people who would appreciate neither this book nor its message.
"They are the kind of people who expect science to provide all the answers and feel let down and fearful when it doesn't." - p 151
"But to dig below the surface (so to speak), to speculate about why people did what they did—either consciously or as unknowing participants in a never-ending historical/political/ecological process—that requires a tolerance for ambiguity. It also helps to have some humility, to recognize that today's stunning insights may tomorrow be no more than orange peels on the compost pile of intellectual history." - p 152
I'm w/ you there, feller.
But, sheesh!, I'm past the Epilogue & there're still a jillion things to quote. These academics.
"Thinking of going into the lucrative field of archaeological consulting? First, read this short novel or another in the series: Burial Ground: An Alan Graham Mystery, by Malcolm Shuman (New York, Avon, 1998). The author gives a very realistic depiction of a contract archeologist (except for all the murders, that is), and it's a good read too. For another kind of fantasy, the Sandia Cave controversy is presented in journalistic style in D. Preston's article, "The Mystery of Sandia Cave," The New Yorker (12 June 1995): 66-83. In case you're wondering if archaeologists really do have ethics, read about them in Archaeological Ethics, edited by Karen Vitelli (Walnut Creek, Calif.: AltaMira Press, 1996). For an enjoyable tour of forgeries, naive misinterpretations, and pseudo-science, I recommend Frauds, Myths, and Mysteries: Science and Pseudoscience in Archaeology, by Kenneth Feder (New York: Mayfield Press, 1977)." - pp 156-157
Tentatively,
>
Books:
archaeology
(2)
Loading...
