Expectation
Nicholas van Rijn:
"'Story,' he said, 'it will not be announced right away, but I bet you rubies to rhubarb the Commonwealth government has already dispatched a task force to Mirkheim. And I am not the least bit sure Babur will take that meekly-weakly.' He turned to a little Martian sandroot statuette of St. Dismas that stood on the bar, his traveling companion of a lifetime. 'Better get busy and pray for us,' he told it."
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise of the Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, March 2011), pp. 1-291 AT III, p. 73.
Daniel Holm:
"'You can't leave now,' Daniel Holm told his son. 'Any day we may be at war. We may already be.'"
-Poul Anderson, The People of the Wind IN Rise of the Terran Empire, pp. 437-662 AT I, p. 437.
Ilya Kheraskov to Dominic Flandry:
"'And meanwhile something else has arisen, on the opposite side of our suzerainty. Something potentially worse than any clash with Merseia.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 367-520 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 384.
"'Here,' he said, 'is where war could really erupt.'"
-ibid., p. 386.
Diana Crowfeather to Fr. Axor:
"'Since, I've kept hearin' rumors - ask your God to make them only rumors, will you? - Sir, we may be on the edge of a real war.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Game of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 215.
4 comments:
There's always "wars and rumors of war".
You can't say if your age is an age of crisis at the time, or beforehand; that's visible only in retrospect.
Though you may strongly -suspect- that's how things will turn out.
Few people in 1914 thought they were in a year of crisis until about July/August.
Even the assassination of FF at first was greeted with a "Ho-hum, more bloodshed in the bloody Balkans, bunch of bloody savages".
Only a decade earlier, the king and queen of Serbia had been assassinated in a coup, their bodies thrown out of a second-story window, and the assassins had done a Serbian folk-dance around the bodies. "Apis", Dragutin Dimitrijevic, who was behind the Sarajevo assassination plot, was involved in that too btw.
In the UK, many thought there was a dangerous crisis in 1914 -- but they thought it was potential civil war over the Irish question.
(Civil war in the whole country, that is, not just Ireland.)
If the war in Ukraine leads to a Russian-NATO confrontation, this will be seen as an age of crisis. Or possibly not...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sure as heck hope we are not living in another 1914. Esp. since I have ZERO confidence "Josip" could successfully handle such a crisis!
I have read that one reason the Germans invaded France thru Belgium in 1914 was because they thought the UK would be too distracted by the Irish crisis to go to war with Germany. AS we know, their gamble failed!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the Germans had convinced themselves that the British wouldn't intervene in a war between the Central Powers and the Entente, or that it wouldn't be a significant intervention. Ghu alone knows why - the diplomatic signals were fairly unambiguous.
The human capacity to convince themselves that what they want to be true -is- true is almost infinite.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Too absolutely gosh darn true! AND the Germans also miscalculated on how quickly the Russians would react, no matter how ineptly that was done.
Ad astra! Sean
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