Sci-fi and Heroic Fantasy discussion

This is our discussion of the story:


Straw by Gene Wolfe

This story is part of the The Best of Gene Wolfe: A Definitive Retrospective of His Finest Short Fiction group collection discussion.

★★1/2

Synopsis
A team of mercenaries travel in a hot-air balloon in an alternate early mediaeval world. They ask a baron for straw which works as fuel for the balloon, but he wants them to stay to defend the castle against an enemy attack.

Review
The story explores how history could have worked if some technology would have developed earlier. There are some interesting techological ideas in it, and the story flows nicely.

This story was surprisingly short and even more surprisingly straightforward. In a world of slightly different technological development, soldiers are welcome when the wolves are at the door.

I thought perhaps the most interesting part of this was the afterword by Wolfe. In it he disagrees with the generally held theory that inventions tend to be inevitable at certain times in technological history (A theory he calls "it's steam engine time".) I would disagree.

In the story he's introduced a couple of advanced technologies to the Middle Ages: hot-air balloons and a projectile weapon which consists of launching the head of a pike (apparently "charged" by repeatedly pressing the butt of the pike into the ground; whether that's a mechanical spring ratchet or pneumatic air pressure device, he doesn't say.) The former requires airtight fabric production in the latter metallurgical advances not readily available in the Middle Ages. (Not that there aren't a few examples of technology whose arrival isn't so tightly bound to the times. Those are usually fortuitous discoveries coupled with astute observation, such as Fleming's penicillin or Goodyear's vulcanized rubber.)