"The Bronze Age, the new age was coming."
-Poul Anderson, The Corridors Of Time (St Albans, Herts, 1975), p. 204.
There will be galactic futures in The Boat Of A Million Years and Starfarers and a cosmic future in the Harvest of Stars tetralogy.
Even deaths can be transformed. In The Shield Of Time, Aryuk dies happy because he has driven the invaders from his people's land and the leader of the invaders is happy because his people go to a New World. If Lorenzo de Conti had not died quickly fighting Manse Everard, he would have died slowly of sickness on the Crusade. If Fulk de Buchy, Knight of the Temple, had not died quickly fighting Manse Everard, he would have been tortured and possibly also burned alive by the Inquisition.
Can we see a pattern developing here? It is also possible to write fiction that follows a group of viewpoint characters through their life and work without always showing how each case was closed or issue resolved. I think that one American police procedural did this? A British novel and TV series about Members of Parliament showed Government Ministers waiting in suspense to hear the outcome of a special forces assault on terrorists holding hostages but did not show us the military action. A graphic work about a press photographer in the Marvel Universe showed him covering superhero fights without necessarily knowing who was on which side or what the outcome was. Thus, there is scope for the fiction of life without neat endings and Poul Anderson would also have been able to master that approach.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
You might not think it matters, but it was not the Inquisition which burned or otherwise executed any persons sentenced to death in its courts. Rather, they were turned over to the secular arm, the state, for execution.
Sean
Sean,
There is a factual but no moral difference between burning someone and handing him over to be burned.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. I would also point out that for a long time many people PREFERRED to be tried in Inquisistorial courts, rather than lay courts, because a higher standard of evidence was required for conviction. And, also because the Inquisitions was far more restrained in its use of judicial torture and more lenient in imposing sentences less than the death penalty than the lay courts.
Sean
I've read claims, though I haven't done the research to confirm them, that the Inquisition pioneered the concept of considering the accused to be innocent until proven guilty. Also, after a certain period, the Inquisition decided that it'd seen no PROVEN cases of witchcraft, and therefore began looking HARD at anyone who brought a witchcraft charge before it, on the theory that these accusers were doing so because of personal grudges rather than any real evidence.
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