a vast expanse of time, the seven hundred years since Altai was colonized;
a vast expanse of space, Altai's remoteness from Terra and its location in the immense buffer zone between Terra and Merseia;
exo-biology, the Altaian ecology with its native and imported organisms;
politics, conflicts on Altai and between Terra and Merseia as well as Betelgeusean neutrality;
religion, the Prophet's Tower but also the humanistic pantheism of the nomadic tribes;
Flandry's career - a knighted captain, perhaps half way from Ensign to Fleet Admiral.
More than just an action-adventure story. As in "Tiger By The Tail" and "The Game of Glory," the ultimate villains, the Merseians, remain off-stage but we see plenty of them elsewhere.
2 comments:
Altai's ecological transformation is analogous to many things that have happened in the last 500 years.
Eg., in South Africa, temperate-zone trees, weeds and other plants often out-compete the native flora... because those are mostly tropical species which have adapted somewhat to a more temperate climate.
Likewise, on Altai the biosphere that evolved during its long cold phase has retreated to the poles, because of the warming due to its sun's expansion. The equatorial and temperate zones have only a few survivors struggling to re-adapt.
Terran plants and animals (and presumably things like nitrogen-fixing bacteria) spread explosively because they're better suited.
Likewise, New Zealand had no mammals to speak of and the Maori had wiped out most of the big flightless birds.
When Europeans arrived, their animals fell on the landscape like escapees to paradise -- there were even feral -sheep-, wandering around like giant burst mattresses with legs, because nothing in the local menagerie was a threat to them.
Plants did the same, only slightly more slowly. There are vast areas of New Zealand where everything you can see, from the grass and weeds through insects to large mammals and birds are descended from imported stock. They have to shoot elk from helicopters to keep their numbers down (presumably local ranchers drew the line at importing wolves, leopards and bears).
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I'm amazed at the idea of there being FERAL sheep!
And I can see why farmers and ranchers would object to importing wolves, leopards, and bears. Killjoys! (Smiles)
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