Substantive: The Conquest of America

One of the main features I picked up in this book (and I was trying desperately to glean information from a story I've heard half a dozen times) was this concept of communication. Columbus in particular seemed convinced of his own worldview, and refused to participate in the acknowledgment of any other. For instance, his insistence that Cuba was the mainland, and not an island, caused him to criticize and abuse the Indians who told him otherwise: "since the information does not suit his purposes, he challenges the quality of his informants" (21). Christopher Columbus wanders into the New World with his own agenda, and as a result everything he sees or thinks he sees is oddly foreordained. His whole discovery is colored by this and as a result his understanding of his own discoveries is fundamentally incomplete.

It reminded me, in a way, of the troubles a lot of people in the various novels we've read have discovered in the course of their alien encounters. The bons on Grass, for instance, base their entire society on a terminology that is fundamentally Earthbound, and therefore totally different from the actuality of the situation, to the extent that most people who try to perceive it from outside are absolutely flabbergasted. It takes Rodrigo a long time to realize that the Hippae aren't really mounts but sentient creatures, because they function to an extent in the same way that horses do.

The Conquistadors took advantage of the Indians and the fundamental social divide between the two cultures with the natural assumption that theirs was the greater and more important culture. The Museum of the American Indian, here in Washington, has walls devoted to the gold the Spaniards took from them, to the various Bibles they forced on them (while simultaneously attempting to expunge their native heritage) and a specific wall with statistics of how many Native Americans died of disease during colonization. That victory is so close to the vague one we get at the end of War of the Worlds that I couldn't help thinking: what happens when we do encounter an alien species?

I'm not sure that humankind has moved very far away from the imperialism that caused this devastating massacre. With The Sparrow we don't have this situation because the explorers were mostly scientists and clergy--it was the native population that sought to exploit them for personal gain, but that difference in communication turned out to be critical.

The way Cortes behaved with the Aztecs reminded me a lot of the Bene Gesserit and the way they took advantage of and implemented messianic legends on Arrakis in Dune. It's sort of dubious, admittedly, whether or not Cortes was actually regarded as the reincarnation of a god or messianic figure, but if it is even remotely true then Cortes took advantage of this to facilitate his own conquest.