Wednesday 13 June 2018

Time Travelers And Shadowspawn II

I am finishing rereading Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time while starting to read SM Stirling's Shadows Of Falling Night. Blog readers might notice dichotomous, or dialectical, posts.

Stirling's vampiric Shadowspawn have a psychic "Power," not supernatural but quantum mechanical, that manifests as:

telepathy;
prescience;
psychokinesis;
metamorphosis;
luck;
astral projection;
indefinite survival of bodily death in the out-of-body aetheric form.

Anderson's mutant time travelers have only one psychic power, the ability to travel backwards or forwards in time by will alone.

Shadowspawn ruled the world prehistorically and again presently. Wallis' time travel group tries to rule the world in the future but Havig's rival group directs civilization away from control by any single group. I hope to see the Shadowspawn extinct by the end of Shadows Of Falling Night.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I would execute practically all adult Shadowspawn, because they were serial mass murderers, torturers, rapists, sadists, etc. But I would spare their children, because they had not yet become monsters and criminals. They would have to be raised and trained to exercise the strictest self-control, with the warning that the first murder and rape by them incurs the death penalty.

There are degrees of guilt, after all. And even a Shadowspawn should not be punished for crimes he or she has not yet perpetrated.

Sean