Thursday 17 September 2015

Free Growth

See here.

After the "proto-series" about Diana Crowfeather, there is one about Roan Tom, a legendary hero or brigand during the post-Imperial "Long Night" period, and another about Daven Laure, a Ranger of the Commonalty.

Hopefully, the galactic spiral-spanning civilization represented by the Commonalty is in "free growth" without any collective "wrong decision" leading to "breakdown." Hopefully, also, the Time Patrol will continue to protect the Danellian timeline from temporal chaos.

The Danellian "rabbi" or "sensei" (see here) says:

"'Perhaps it is not the best course, but we are no gods to impose anything different when we know that it does at last take us beyond what our animal selves could have imagined.'" (The Shield Of Time, p. 435)

There is no "Perhaps..." about it. However, the Danellians are not human beings in "free growth" but super-human beings. I will return to the philosophical implications of the rabbi/sensei's discourse.

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Sandra Miesel edited the collection called THE LONG NIGHT, including stories set in the "little long night" of the Time of Troubles and the ones set during and after the vastly worse Long Night following the fall of the Terran Empire. It was probably Miesel who included this cautionary note placed at the end of "Starfog" on page 274 of THE LONG NIGHT: "And now a new cycle turns on Fortune's cosmic wheel. Another brilliant era races to its apogee. What hidden flaws will send the Commonalty spinning downward into darkness like the Empire and the League before it? Let its free and lively people prosper while they may, for as a proverb handed down from Old Earth puts it, Shines the sun ne'er so bright,/in the end must come the night."

I think this warning applies even to the Danellians as well as the Commonalty. What hidden flaws, never mind quantum flux accidents, might bring down even the super human Danellians?

Sean

Paul Shackley said...

Sean,
You will see that I have responded with a blog post.
Paul.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I saw, and commented on it myself.

Sean