A character addressed as "Stefan" comes on-stage on the last page of "Marius." Sandra Miesel's following interstitial passage refers to him as "Stefan Rostomily." A character called "Stef" had died five years before the beginning of "Un-Man." On p. 34, he is referred to a "Stefan Rostomily." Rostomily was the genetic template for the Brotherhood of Un-Men. We see several Un-Men in this story and another later in "Brake." These characters were a potential series. Successive Un-Men could have played the role of a single unstoppable Un-Man.
There are two other potential sub-series later in the Psychotechnic History -
"Gypsy": the first Nomad ship, the Traveler;
"The Pirate": Coordination Service agent, Trevelyan Micah;
The Peregrine: Trevelyan joins the Nomad ship, the Peregrine.
Instead of extending, these two potential series converge. According to Miesel:
"...as Trevelyan had foreseen decades earlier, the self-sufficient, enterprising Nomads bore seeds of knowledge safely through the Third Dark Ages."
-The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 3, p. 194.
The knowledge carried by the Nomads would have been increased when Coordinators became Nomads. If "The Chapter Ends" is part of this future history series, then that knowledge included psychotechnics so that the promise of Valti in "Marius" was at last fulfilled.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Anderson's Un-Men must have been one of the earliest uses in science fiction of cloning (despite that last word not being known at the time). At least I don't recall that idea being used by other SF writers in the 1940's and 1950's.
Happy New Year! Sean
Sean: well, Poul was an actual scientist himself and he kept up with developments in many fields. He was unusually prescient there. Perhaps extrapolating from the phenomenon of identical twins?
I've often thought that the way to make hereditary monarchy less of a crapshoot would be to clone the monarch.
Identical twins don't have identical personalities, but they -do- show strongly -similar- personalities, even if raised separately, and similar IQ's and abilities.
So if the monarch was cloned, and then raised in a roughly 'standard' way, you'd get generation after generation with similar outlooks and abilities.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, Anderson studied and trained to become a scientist, before becoming a free lance writer. And that scientific background certainly informed his stories. I can see that knowledge shaping how he used the "Un-Men."
You are right, I don't recall any writers, even Anderson, examining the idea of what might happen from a hereditary monarchy using human cloning for regulating the succession. I'm not entirely sure it would work any better than any other method tried by humans, but it's intriguing and worth being tried out by science fiction writers.
Happy New Year! Sean
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