-Poul Anderson, The Day of Their Return IN Anderson, Captain Flandry: Defender Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 74-238 AT 1, p. 75.
This opening sentence of a novel is preceded by a Biblical quotation: JOB, iv, 12-16. The sentence itself is obviously New Testament-inspired. The title, The Day Of Their (not His) Return, sounds un-Biblical. The novel features a religious movement incorporating Biblical elements. In fact, the work reads like a much better version of Dune just as Poul Anderson's Technic History reads like a much better version of Foundation.
"To Yuri Alexeievitch Garshin, the captain appeared as an angel from his grandmother's Heaven. It was on the third day since the ambush."
-The Shield Of Time, PART TWO, 1985 A. D., p. 11.
Angel, Heaven and third day. "...grandmother's Heaven..." is a recognition of generational social change.
Garshin thinks:
"Angel from Heaven indeed." (p. 14)
- when the captain, after his mysterious appearance, is helpful.
"Behind and above, the captain stood, arms folded, watching him go. When Garshin glanced rearward, a last time, he saw sunlight from behind the helmet make a kind of halo, as if on an angel who guarded some place mysterious and forbidden." (p. 16)
Halo, angel, mystery. But there is more symbolism here that we understand only in hindsight. The captain is a time traveller, a Time Patrol agent, a guardian of time. The place that he guards is mysterious and forbidden indeed because this timeline is to be deleted.
6 comments:
And, of course, after the operation, Garshin gets no help and just dies.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, unless Garshin managed to reach Soviet forces.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's implied that he didn't; in fact, they chose him for the role in the little play they put on for the Exaltationists to attract them to Bactria precisely -because- he was 'slated' to be an anonymous casualty never heard of again.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that made sense. In the "unaltered" timeline Garshin did die. So, when it was "corrected," he still had to, most likely, die.
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: though belief in Orthodox Christianity has made a big comeback in Russia. I would bet that it was never as suppressed as the Soviets liked to think.
Eg., it turns out that Putin's mother had him clandestinely baptized, and told him, and this was a quasi-secret part of his life.
And he was a KGB agent.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Unfortunately, that resurgence in belief in Russian Orthodox Christianity has been expressed in sometimes unfortunate ways. Most clearly in excessive subservience to the state and in getting mixed up with Russian nationalism.
Also, it's my belief Putin has been much more of a Marxist-Leninist and Soviet apparatchik than he was Russian Orthodox. His mother could not have been the only one to insist on having her children baptized during the Soviet period. But I don't think Christianity really meant anything to him.
The last Tsars of Russia, Alexander III and Nicholas II, men who ACTIVELY believed in Christianity, BEHAVED better than Putin has been doing.
Ad astra! Sean
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