This story comprises mainly fight scenes which we need not recount.
On the Not Our Culture theme:
it is regarded as perfectly in order for Flandry to give Ella to Duke Alfred as a present;
she is placed in the Duke's harem where, appropriately, the attendants are not human eunuchs but non-human beings.
The Duke's plot as deduced by Flandry is not obvious but makes some sense. When a message purportedly from a barbarian king announces that the ransom for the kidnapped Princess Megan will be a portion of Sector Tauria, the Duke will offer to mobilize, which he would not normally be able to do without coming under suspicion. Having mobilized, he will declare independence. Devious but deadly: create a threat, then reveal that you are it.
Poul Anderson, writing space opera, had merely projected the Roman Empire, complete with Emperor and slaves, onto an interstellar stage. When, in The People Of The Wind, written later but set earlier, he explained the reasons for the reintroduction of slavery, this was part of his construction of a future history, which is a more serious operation than another space opera.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And in my "Crime and Punishment in the Terran Empire" article, I quoted from a letter of Anderson explaining how the libertarianism of the Polesotechnic League helped lead to that revival of slavery.
Ad astra! Sean
Note that slavery has been a ubiquitous institution in human history — even hunter-gatherers practice it, in the form of kidnapping of women. It may not be a very -important- part of the social order, but it’s at least marginally present in most times and places.. Medieval wesatern Europe was one of the very first large areas where it died out completely, between about 1100 and 1250 CE; and later, in the 19th century, westerners went around the globe forcing others to give it up at gunpoint.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree! But I can't help wondering how EFFECTIVE that Western disapproval of slavery will be, in the long term. My late British friend, Bruce Binnie, was an RAF officer who served in Libya during King Idris' reign. He told me of how Libyans used to tell him that they would one day again be enslaving blacks, when Western influence had waned.
I regret even the marginal use of slavery, mainly as a punishment for crime, in the Terran Empire. but, at least it was marginal!
Ad astra! Sean
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