Bronze Summer

Technically I wasn't done with Stephen Baxter "The Wall"'s Stone Spring. There's a second part: Bronze Summer. I found that used (along with Stephen Donaldson's Seventh Decimate) and (having finished that) am on to it.

The date is, now, 1200 BC possibly pushed back in time. Troy VI has fallen and Troy VII is a shantytown good for little but cheap whores. Civilisation is doing better overall because literacy is more widespread; Troy's collapse is not The Bronze Age collapse. [UPDATE 10/23: Yet.] The settled farm-towns aren't doing as well as they should be doing, which I'll get to.

Baxter's Hittites have a steel monopoly because our man did not know Albert Jambon's Irons of the Bronze Age, which came out 2017. But I recall that monopoly being overblown all through the 1990s and beyond; the only decent steel in the, derrrp, age of bronze was meteoric. Just like King Tut's dagger. See for instance Robert Drews in 1992 who pointed out that the new military tech of 1200 BC was all still bronze. It's Baxter trying to be clever and cutting-edge again, and failing at it.

Just like when Baxter was retracing the Across Atlantic Ice route, which was that other main departure-point besides the Seawall Of The Jǫtunn. In this world, Iceland exists with a mixed North Hunter Gatherer / Skraeling population. Their ships can reach the Olmec on the other side of the Gulf of Mexico, to borrow their stonemasons. However "exotic" the wood was at the Anse, they didn't have rubber.

As for what else is different what I am having trouble believing: the hunter-gatherers have survived but the Neolithic European farmers, somehow, have not. I get the impression that Gimbutas and Mallory didn't make an impression: there was no Kurgan or Bell-Beaker influx, because the farmers were Indo-European. So everyone is Gaulish or Greek. (And Hittite in Anatolia, but I'm fine with that much.) Did the introduction of a stone seawall to everyone's north mean that civic society came past the Balkans before 4000 BC, with the plague hitting before, and Indo-Europeans arriving before, so no-one remembers?

I could go on. Is there a hillfort / oppidum culture like the Romans found? Who's keeping literacy among the bronze baronies - druids? And if the stone towns are older so everyone's learnt why rats and fleas are bad, then why is everything still so filthy - where's Roman-era sanitation?

I'm at the point of suspecting an author's fetish, like Donaldson's incurable frustration and internalised rage. Baxter The Wall is still subjecting his characters to you-know-what, including the teenaged boys. Everything we animals do which humans would rather have done in private are, still, done out in the open.