Thursday 7 September 2017

"The Warriors From Nowhere"

Dominic Flandry begins "The Warriors from Nowhere" by saying that the Terran Empire is decadent and overripe, not that it is in internal conflict.

Human barbarians in helmets, cuirass and kilts, some wielding swords, use a disc-shaped vessel - the traditional "flying saucer" (!) - as a tender to an orbiting mother ship.

The revised text of the story acknowledges that the current Emperor has recently acceded by force.

Flandry uses an "infotrieve" again.

Vor - and how many other planets? - was discovered by Cynthians but colonised by human beings.

Flandry's deduction about Duke Alfred's scheme:

a barbarian king will demand, as ransom for the kidnapped princess, a major part of the Taurian Sector;

the Emperor will want to wage war;

Duke Alfred, as governor of the sector, will offer to mobilise;

having mobilised to an extent otherwise impossible, he will then be able to declare himself an independent monarch;

he will have local support and the cost of crushing him would be too great.

OK. I did wonder how kidnapping Princess Megan would help Alfred to declare Taurian independence. It was necessary to reread the story to find out.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And the fact that Duke Alfred would never have dared to embark on his ambitious schemes if he had lacked strong local support was why Emperor Hans shifted the sector capital from Varrak to Dennitza.

I think we should understand the repeated mentions of Flandry using an "infotrieve" as meaning the Empire did have an Internet. Terra, Merseia, Betelgeuse, Yythri, etc., certainly did have the computer technology needed for that.

Sean