Maybe compare it with his The High Crusade.
(There are some parallels: rereading Crusade made me think of Doomsday.)
Continue to read SM Stirling's The Sky-Blue Wolves.
Continue other reading and blogging.
Prepare a talk on a materialist understanding of religion.
(Anderson's The Corridors Of Time shows different religions reflecting different social relationships.)
Must start that talk. Back here later.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Or a religion might utterly transform a culture it came to! In one of his essays Poul Anderson gave us a thought experiment of a Roman of the reign of Augustus speculating about what might happen in the future. But that Roman could never have thought of what actually happened in a totally unexpected way: that the "heretical" offshoot of the religion of a despised backward province would completely transform Rome, the barbarians, and global history. So, I remain skeptical of merely materialist conceptions of religion.
Sean
Sean,
A lot of PA's works are relevant to these issues and present extremely concrete examples of alternative scenarios, including the scenario of our particular history.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree! And Anderson's "The House of Sorrows" gives us some speculations about what have happened if Judaism had disappeared and Christianity never came to exist. One result being that a true science had not yet arisen in "House," with the implication it might never come to exist in that timeline. And Anderson would not have liked that.
Sean
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