Heinlein’s very popular novel had a significant short-term effect on the culture when it came out but a negligible long-term effect, beyond adding “grok” to the language. Its most radical message was the idea of group marriage of a particular sort. The nests it described were stable high trust families formed with minimal search and courtship. You looked into someone’s eyes, recognized him or her as a water brother, and knew you could trust each other forever after. It was a naively romantic picture, possibly workable with the assistance of the protagonist’s superpowers, risky in the real world but fitting well into the naively romantic hippy culture of the time. Quite a lot of people tried to implement it; for some it may have worked. When I spoke on a panel at a science fiction convention some years ago, one audience member made it reasonably clear that she had joined a nest, was still in it, and was happy with the result.
Sexual mores changed but not, for most, in that direction. Living in southern California in the eighties, the view that seemed most common among young adults — many of those I associated with would have been people I met through the SCA,1 a subculture that had noticeable overlap with both science fiction fandom and hippiedom — was very different. The ideal pattern was stable monogamy but who could be so lucky? Insofar as it had been replaced it was mostly by the increasing acceptability and practice of casual sex.
There has been some development since Stranger was published, in practice and theory, along the lines of group marriage of a somewhat different sort. Polyamory is more self-conscious and, at least in theory, more structured than what we see in Stranger. Partners are classified as primary or secondary and a good deal of attention paid to what those terms mean and what behavior they imply. The result is in theory closer to the Oneida Commune of the 19th century, on a much smaller scale, than to the nest described in Stranger.2
This fits not only what happened in the real world but what happened in Heinlein’s fictional worlds. Consider a more sophisticated version of group marriage, the line marriage in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. It is highly organized, with new members brought in at the low age end on a regular pattern of alternating gender. There is extensive search/courtship. And the protagonist offers a plausible explanation of its social role, why the institutions developed and what purposes it served.
Finally, consider Friday, a later novel. The protagonist, surprisingly naive given her profession — secret agent — joins a group marriage, makes a substantial commitment to it and is booted out, her share of the assets stolen, when it is discovered that she is an artificial person, the superior product of genetic engineering. Her much later commitment to a second group marriage follows more careful research.
David D. Friedman, “Odds and Ends”, David Friedman’s Substack, 2023-04-29.
1. The Society for Creative Anachronism, a historical recreation organization I have been active in for a very long time.
2. The practice sometimes ends up as open marriage, monogamous for purposes of producing and rearing children but with no obligation to sexual exclusivity — an option made possible by reliable contraception.
July 31, 2023
QotD: Stranger in a Strange Land at 50
December 28, 2022
What we still don’t know about historical European swordfighting
I was for many years a member of the SCA partly for the attraction of the historical period and partly for the swordfighting. The Society developed a (mostly) safe simulation of (some) medieval combat styles and later introduced (some) renaissance rapier combat as well (initially borrowing equipment standards from modern sport fencing). Around the time the SCA began to consider expanding from high medieval sword-and-shield styles, separate organizations in Europe and the United States sprang up to be more consciously historical in how they recreated historical blade combat, these groups are often collectively referred to as Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) or Western Martial Arts (WMA). The foundation documents for HEMA and other historical combat enthusiasts are the various surviving manuals of swordmasters and fencing school owners which cover a kaleidoscope of weapons, techniques, advice, and how-to illustrations … some of which appear to be physically impossible for ordinary human beings:
MS Thott.290.2º f.87r.
The ultimate experts in medieval sword fighting were the “fight masters” – elite athletes who trained their disciples in the subtle arts of close combat. The most highly renowned were almost as famous as the knights they trained, and many of the techniques they used were ancient, dating back hundreds of years in a continuous tradition.
Little is known about these rare talents, but the scraps of information that have survived are full of intrigue. Hans Talhoffer, a German fencing master with curly hair, impressive sideburns and a penchant for tight body suits, had a particularly chequered past. In 1434, he was accused of murdering a man and admitted abducting him in the Austrian city of Salzburg.
Fight masters worked with a grisly assortment of deadly weapons. The majority of training was dedicated to fencing with the longsword, or the sword and buckler (a style of combat involving holding a sword in one hand, and a small shield in the other). However, they also taught how to wield daggers, poleaxes, shields, and even how to fight with nothing at all, or just a bag of rocks (more on this later).
It’s thought that some fight masters were organised into brotherhoods, such as the Fellowship of Liechtenauer – a society of around 18 men who trained under the shadowy grandmaster Johannes Lichtenauer in the 15th Century. Though details about the almost-legendary figure himself have remained elusive, it’s thought he led an itinerant life, travelling across borders to train a handful of select proteges and learn new fencing secrets.
Other fight masters stayed closer to home – hired by dukes, archbishops and other assorted nobles to train themselves and their guards. A number even set up their own “fight schools”, where they gathered less wealthy students for regular weekly sessions.
[…]
For all their beauty, the hand-drawn works could also be decidedly bloodthirsty. In Talhoffer’s 1467 manual, neat sequences of moves that look almost like dancing end abruptly with swords through eye-sockets, violent impalings, and casual instructions to beat the opponent to death. Some signature techniques even have names – chilling titles like the “wrath-hew”, “crumpler”, “twain hangings”, “skuller” and “four openings”.
Despite passing through countless generations of owners, and – in some cases – centuries of graffiti, burns, theft, and mysterious periods of vanishment from the historical record, a surprising number survive today. This includes at least 80 codexes from German-speaking regions alone.
Impossible moves and missing clues
But there’s a problem. Many of the techniques in combat manuals, also known as “fechtbücher“, are convoluted, vague, and cryptic. Despite the large corpus of remaining books, they often offer surprisingly little insight into what the fight master is trying to convey.
“It’s famously difficult to take these static unmoving woodcut images, and determine the dynamic action of combat,” says Scott Nokes, “This has been a topic of debate, research and experimentation for generations.”
On some occasions these manuals seem to depict contortions of the body that are physically impossible, while those that attempt to convey moves in three dimensions sometimes give combatants extra arms and legs that were added in by accident. Others contain instructions that are frustratingly opaque – sometimes depicting actions that don’t seem to work, or building upon enigmatic moves that have long-since been lost.
Oddly, the text is often written as poetry, rather than prose – and a few authors even made it hard to interpret their works on purpose.
Lichtenauer recorded his instructions in obscure verses which remain almost incomprehensible today – one expert has gone so far as to call them “gibberish”. According to a contemporary fight master he trained, the grandmaster wrote in “secret words” to prevent them from being intelligible to anyone who didn’t value his art highly enough.
Even when it is possible to decipher what a combat manual is describing or demonstrating, some experts suspect that crucial contextual information is always missing.
March 23, 2022
QotD: Fansplaining that feudalism is bad
Portrayal is not promulgation, people.
That said, I’ve spent thirty years learning that no writer, be they ever so clear and plain, can control how readers read, or misread, their texts. Reading is a dance, not a march. If some readers step on one’s feet, well, it’s still better than sitting by the wall … Usually.
Lois McMaster Bujold, “Lois McMaster Bujold on Fanzines, Cover Art, and the Best Vorkosigan Planet”, Tor.com, 2017-11-02.
December 1, 2016
Rick Goes Medieval
Published on 30 Nov 2016
Rick joins the Society for Creative Anachronism in recreating life in the middle ages at the Feast of the Hare in Ottawa in the Kingdom of Ealdormere (Ontario).
January 11, 2015
Sport fencing no longer teaches swordsmanship – HEMA does
I’ve given (shorter and less detailed) variants of this argument many times. I agree with pretty much everything he says here:
I started to learn sport fencing (or “Olympic-style”) as a child in England. My parents were both long-time fencers, so one of my earliest memories is from around age three or four, standing in our tiny backyard, trying to learn basic parries with a foil. My father had been experimenting with bringing in a form of rapier and dagger at his fencing club, but there were no reasonable simulation rapiers on the market in those days, so the default equipment was a sabre and a broken-off foil as a dagger. Let’s just say that the idea was very popular in the club, but the implementation failed to energize many because the equipment wasn’t all that close to representative: the weapons were far too light and any attempt to use historical methods was doomed because the swordplay lacked the momentum of full-sized/full-weight rapiers. Things that worked fantastically well with the modern weapons would get you deader than dead using proper historical weaponry.
I gave up sport fencing as a hobby around the time that orthopedic grips and electrical scoring came in … as the man says in the video above, it became too much like electric tag and too little like historical swordplay. Instead of being relatively straight or slightly curved, orthopedic grips looked rather like what would happen if you squeezed a ball of soft coloured clay in your hand. I hated the feel of them, but other fencers at my club loved them. The electrical scoring system of the day required each fencer to wear an over-jacket covering the valid target area, and trail along a cable attached to the back of the over-jacket. The matching foil had a socket on the inside of the guard for attaching the cable to the other side of the scoring circuit. When the tip of the foil hit the conductive surface of the opponent’s over-jacket, the circuit was completed and a point would be scored.
It was clumsy and awkward, and didn’t feel much like a swordfight. I pretty much gave up the foil and switched to sabre, for they didn’t yet have a working electric system for sabre fighting, so you didn’t need to get hooked up to the machine just to fight a bout. When they got that little problem fixed, I’d already given up sport fencing.
The SCA finally adopted rapier fencing and the Historical European Martial Arts (HEMA) movement arrived well after I’d given up sport fencing, and I’ve enjoyed the SCA’s rapier combat quite a bit (although I tend to go inactive for a year or two, then go back for a similar length of time … I may not improve that way, but it’s still fun). More serious fencers and those interested in a wider range of styles end up joining HEMA organizations, where I’m told they take things much more seriously. I can’t say from personal experience, as I only visited a Toronto HEMA group once and most of the members there were working on much earlier styles of swordplay (like longsword) than I was interested in at the time.
H/T to Brendan McKenna for the link to the video.
February 28, 2014
“Reenactment’s for pussies”
The SCA or Western Martial Arts not macho enough for you? You might be interested in medieval combat with steel weapons:
Steel kisses steel. Actual sparks fly. An axe snaps in half as it dents a helmet. A municipal garbage bin, carelessly left at the fringes of the fight, implodes in a sorry mess of dented plastic as four armored men collapse onto it.
I’m witnessing, from the far side of a flimsy rope, something much more violent than your average historical battle reenactment. These men are engaging in full-contact medieval combat in an open training session for the U.K. iteration of a growing global society. More GBH than LARP, it substitutes foam weaponry for real steel and scripted acting for unpredictable scuffling, and despite the mayhem, operates under tightly controlled rules and regulations.
[…]
The team’s press officer, Nick Birkin, agrees. “Reenactors are used to dink, dink,” he says, mimicking the prissy swordplay anyone who’s sat through a retelling of Agincourt will no doubt cringe to recall. Another weekend warrior sums up the distinction more succinctly: “Reenactment’s for pussies.”
I first heard about the Russian origins of this new organization from a co-worker who was still upset he’d had to leave his chainmail and weapons behind when he came to Canada from St. Petersburg. It sounded like great fun … but was significantly more injury-prone than the SCA combat of my youth.
The Russian connection also brings with it some aspects that make Western practitioners uncomfortable:
The West’s notions of fair play and how an international tournament should be run are, it would seem, at odds with that of the East’s. Dissent has been stirring among the camps and honor was called into question on several sides, and complaints started to be raised about the Russian organizers. The first to percolate were stories about rule-changing and underhand tournament organization.
“They said that under no circumstances can you have a metal handle on your shield, and that you can’t wear titanium armor,” U.S. team captain Andre Sinou tells me later over the phone from his native New Jersey. Sinou is also the owner of an armory manufacturer called Icefalcon. “So I told my guys that. Then when we went out there, all the Eastern teams had metal handles. We complained, and they said, ‘Oh, we sent out a memo’, which none of the Western countries got.”
Many of the Eastern fighters were wearing Kevlar armor under their suits and came with lethal equipment — such as two-handled halberd axes — that was banned for anyone else. “The weapons that some of the Eastern teams were using were just dangerous,” Sinou says. “They were pointy, they didn’t follow the rules for sharpness. After 2013, we had puncture wounds — we had a meaty guy who got punctured all the way down to the bone on the shoulder. It hit his spine. He could have been paralyzed.”
Nick Birkin from Team U.K. echoes many of these complaints and adds his own stories of match fixing, detailing devious techniques that would put a Sochi figure-skating judge to shame and which apparently allowed Russian teams to progress further and enjoy longer rest breaks between contests. But the growing concerns of an increasing number of countries was met by a response almost laughably Kafkaesque.
H/T to Steve Muhlberger for the link.
October 12, 2012
One for the heralds
On the Lois McMaster Bujold mailing list (http://lists.herald.co.uk/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/lois-bujold), Eric Oppen posted this in an off-topic thread about clothing trends:
Whenever someone starts waxing envious in my presence about foreign countries’ practice of wearing school uniforms, and wishes the same on American kids, I like to respond:
“That’s a wonderful idea! And I know just the sort needed! The colors would be “barry argent and sable, semee’ of pheons, countercharged.”
Most people don’t get the joke, but I said that in front of several SCA heralds once, who were all highly amused and said I was being quite multicultural.
(For those not familiar with heraldic language, what I am suggesting is uniforms featuring horizontal black-and-white stripes, scattered with “broad arrowheads” white on black and black on white. IOW, combining the features of traditional US and UK prison uniforms.)
Posted with Eric’s permission, of course.
August 7, 2011
“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player”
Poland’s answer to the Society for Creative Anachronism, Knights’ Brotherhoods stage their own form of medieval recreation:
Compering and judging the hand-to-hand combat is Krzysztof Ptasinski, the son of a Polish diplomat who learnt English from an American teacher in Addis Ababa and insists I call him “Redneck Chris”.
His hooded robe and summer gear make him look like a monk in flip-flops.
“Whoa dude! Ouch! In your face!” he hollers as two knights wearing full body-plate armour weighing 35kg (77lb) lay into each other with double-handed swords.
To progress, a knight has to reach five points, each earned by laying a clean blow on an opponent above the knee.
The swords are blunt, of course, but that does not mean it is completely harmless.
“When I used to do this I broke my hand 14 times, and I’m a banjo player,” he says.
“I’ve got two screws in this finger. I had a cracked skull.
“When we were fighting the Belarusian guys, I had my kidney displaced.”
I ask him what the appeal is.
“Whenever you get hit in the helmet you almost lose consciousness because it’s so loud. It’s a thrill,” he says.
I used to work with a guy from St. Petersburg who told me all about the replica medieval armour and weapons he had to leave behind when he came to Canada. It sounds like this is a similar group.
From this description, the group doesn’t have quite the same concerns about participant safety that the SCA and other North American re-creationist/re-enactor groups have generally adopted.
March 5, 2011
Local SCA group gets a bit of newspaper coverage
Actually, compared to a lot of newspaper articles on the SCA, this one isn’t too bad:
The Society is a global organization with some 30,000 registered members reliving the world before the 17th century. Most stick to European history, but there are plenty of katana-wielding Japan enthusiasts among the ranks. Members get together and do any and everything medieval and renaissance, from armored combat and blacksmithing to the craftier trades such as glass-etching and embroidery.
The Toronto group is know as the Canton of Eoforwic
of, one chapter of the Kingdom of Ealdormere, which encompasses most of Ontario and is one of 19 worldwide kingdoms. Each kingdom has its own King, Queen and handful of other royals and nobility.Unlike a Renaissance Faire, these gatherings are not for anyone’s entertainment but their own.
“We’re not playing to an audience, we’re just doing things for fun,” Ms. Carroll-Clark says.
No mention of rapier combat (my bit of the SCA), but that’s not surprising — even in the SCA it’s a minority interest.
July 3, 2010
More swordwork today
As I expected, the larger turnout of fencers yesterday prevented me from repeating as high a finish as the last two tournaments, but there’s more happening today. The morning tournament was a double-elimination, but the afternoon was a much briefer single-elimination. At least with double-elimination, you can recover from a mistake (theoretically).
July 2, 2010
Off to do some swordwork
There’s a big SCA event literally down the street from us today, so I’m off to do some rapier fencing. The last two tournaments I entered went very well for me (first place and second place), even though they were more than a year apart. I doubt I’ll do so well today: lots more competition including folks I’ve never fought before. Still, it should be a lot of fun.
June 30, 2010
Questionable police tactics at the G20 protests
Jon, my former virtual landlord, sent me a link to this video, saying “My support for the police evaporates with [this] video. What the hell were the police thinking?”:
He then suggested that this is a Toronto Police Services training video:
Update: Even better than the ragged charge shown in the first video, now the police are showing off some of the “weapons” they collected during the G20, including LARP (Live Action Role Playing) gear confiscated from a gamer:
Toronto Police are on the defensive this week as they attempt to defend their heavy-handed tactics during the G20. To prove the seriousness of the threat to public security, they took police on a tour of weapons confiscated from activists.
Only there’s a problem: some of these weapons were taken from people who weren’t demonstrators. And some of them weren’t weapons — the police proudly displayed the blunt arrows and chainmail they confiscated from a live-action role-player who was taking the train to a game
If they’d found a random SCA heavy fighter to take the armour and weapons from, they might have a slightly better case: SCA heavy combat gear would be comparable to (in many cases better than) police riot gear. SCA weapons are solid rattan covered with silver duct tape to make them appear to be metal — LARP weapons are non-functional foam or other light material (similar “weapons” are called “boffers” and are used as safe toys for kids). SCA shields are fully functional as protection — LARPers generally carry lightweight shields that just look like protection but would not do much in a real confrontation.
I liked this comment to the BoingBoing post:
I remember seeing this same police press conference, only it was in Miami in 2004 during the FTAA summit. Among the items they presented as having seized from activists:
– Tire iron
– Gas can
– A map of Miami (see, they could use it to plan out their terrorist strike!)It took me a minute to realize they had just pulled all this stuff out of the trunk of some unfortunate activists’ car, where you’d totally expect to find it.
This kind of press conference is a standard component in the “new model” of protest suppression. It gives the police the hilarious task of taking a whole bunch of mostly innocuous stuff they seized and making up stories about how it could be used to maim, kill, and generally cause mass destruction.
I mean srsly – an empty water bottle could be used to fill with gasoline and throw at cops?
Bruce Schneier would be proud.
June 5, 2010
Light blogging today
I’m away from the computer, competing in an SCA rapier tournament near Peterborough, Ontario. Lots of interesting sites to visit over in the right-hand column.
Update: You know, it would have helped if I’d actually published this entry before heading off this morning. I’m now back, bruised yet unbowed, happy in my second-place finish in the tournament. Last time I competed there (before injuring my shoulder and having to take a few years off), I won the tournament. This time, with more fencers taking part, I still managed to claim second. That’s pretty good after such a long lay-off from competition. I’m more than satisfied.
