Sunday 15 December 2019

Recently On This Blog

(This afternoon, Christmas meal with former work colleagues at the White Cross.)

Recently on the blog, starting from "Where the mighty Sagittarius flows into The Gulf of Centaurs...," (here) we have considered:

Christopher Holm and Tabitha Falkayn on Livewell Street and in the Nest;

Ythrians on Avalon, on Ythri and in space;

The Earth Book Of Stormgate;

fictional languages;

Coya Conyon in "Lodestar" and Mirkheim;

various characters in The Day Of Their Return - Erannanth, Desai, Aycharaych, Uldwyr, Tatiana and Jaan but not yet Ivar Frederiksen;

prequels and sequels in the Technic History;

the town of Boseville on the Rive Flone on the planet Aeneas.

In fact, we have moved from Centauri on the Sagittarius on Avalon to Boseville on the Flone on Aeneas. Following the theme of Ythrians through the Technic History, I reopened The Day Of Their Return because its characters include Erannath of Stormgate Choth on Avalon, then got drawn further into the novel by the other characters. For example, there is a lot to be said about Chunderban Desai.
We have not yet exhausted a rereading of  The Day Of Their Return.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

And we also took note of the glimpses given us in THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN of how the Empire was administered. In that report read by Desai I hope you noticed the bits we get of how INFORMATION was collected, such as something called "Regional Data Processing," which I understood to mean as a branch of an Imperial agency specifically tasked with collecting and evaluating information.

If the state, any state, under whatever form, is to ACT reasonably effectively (and I hope, not too badly or blunderingly), it needs accurate information. Which has to be obtained in many different ways, both from its own agencies and private sources. And care needs to be taken not to be either too credulous about that information or to partisan preferences get in the way of how that data is used.

I wrote that last sentence in my second paragraph above because of how the report of the Inspector General of the US Dept. of Justice has been very damning of how political opponents of Pres. Trump in the civil service allowed their prejudices to to claim as true false information gained from discredited sources to abusively use the FISA court to obtain warrants to "investigate" the President.

Ad astra! Sean