"It is the twilight of the Terran Empire. The warriors who made it great are long gone now, and the traders of the Polesotechnic League who made it possible are the dimly-remembered stuff of legend. Alien enemies prowl its outer precincts, and Sector Governors conspire for the Throne of Man. On Terra herself, those who occupy the labyrinthine corridors of power busy themselves with trivialities and internal politics, as outside the final darkness gathers."
-Young Flandry (New York, 2010), back cover.
The blurb deploys evocative terms and phrases: twilight; Empire; warriors; legend; enemies prowling; Throne; not only "corridors of power" but "labyrinthine" ones; the final darkness gathering.
The warriors that made the Empire great include the Founder who, in the previous volume, led a slave revolt, seized a slaver ship and attacked the slavers' planet. How did the League make the Empire possible? It "...spread a truly universal civilization..." (The Van Rijn Method, p. 146), which the Empire took over when the previous system of government had broken down.
Alien enemies include not only a rival imperialism but also barbarians armed with spaceships and nuclear weapons by unscrupulous traders - the other side of the League. The corridors of power include the city-sized Admiralty Center where Flandry receives his orders in the third Young Flandry novel.
The second paragraph of this blurb describes Flandry as "...blazing a trail across the galaxy..." whereas, of course, in this era, known space comprises only one outer part of a single spiral arm. Anderson's text is more considered and restrained than an extravagant blurb.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, I agree, whoever wrote this blurb actually did a good, even evocative job of writing something designed to get readers interested in the book and, hopefully, buy it. So a little exaggeration on the blurb writer's part was forgivable!
And the descriptions we see of Admiralty Center in WE CLAIM THESE STARS and THE REBEL WORLDS were certainly both evocative and anxiously foreboding. Esp. in the former work. And the descriptions given of the Coral Palace, the Crystal Moon, and Flandry's very HORDIAN conversation with Aycharaych in the latter also comes to mind. And I wish we had more than brief glimpses of Archopolis!
Sean
I would like to find more on Hord's ideas.
What I have seen sounds very similar to Toynbee.
I have read a fair bit of Toynbee I would like to know where they differ.
https://scholarsarchive.byu.edu/ccr/vol17/iss17/6/
Thank You
It is now downloaded for later reading.
Now that I have read it I want to find more.
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