Recent posts inspired by Anderson's Time Patrol series have referred, explicitly or implicitly, to several significant year dates:
1307
1805
1815
1850
1850-2000
1890-1910
1902
1914-1918
1925
1942
1944
1947
1954
1965
1988
1990
2015
These years are important to history or to certain Time Patrol agents or to both. We have very briefly reviewed some of the history. 1914 overturned an international order that had endured since 1815. We are still living in the lengthy aftermath of 1914-1918. Reading historical fiction encourages the reading of history. I have started Alexander Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. I do not need to be persuaded that Stalin's Russia was a brutal dictatorship but am interested in the evidence about Lenin's role.
Thus, expected reading in the immediate future comprises:
Mother Of Kings;
SM Stirling's third Draka novel;
Solzhenitsyn;
Julius Caesar's account of his second attack on Britain.
4 comments:
Kaor ,Paul!
I'll be very interested in any comments you care to make here about Alexander Solzhenitsyn's THEGULAG ARCHIPELAGO. Volume 1 focuses, naturally, on Lenin's role in the development of the USSR. I esp. recall how often the author quoted Lenin's own words and writings to justify his argument that Stalin simply expanded, developed, and continued what Lenin had started.
From a literary point of view, I'm not sure if Solzhenitsyn will be entirely to your taste. I mean he sometimes uses black humor and savage comedy to relieve the grimness of the history he narrates.
I can even find one or two examples from Poul Anderson's works giving us his view of Lenin and the USSR. In "Details" we see aliens manipulating Germany to inject Lenin like a plague bacillus (to paraphrase Churchill's words) into Russia in 1917--with disastrous results.
And of course I will be interested in what ever you say about Anderson's MOTHER OF KINGS. Some commentators I've seen elsewhere have been puzzled by that book. Briefly, Queen Gunnhild and most of her sons were not very nice people--while their enemies (such as Haakon the Good) tended to be more preferable. So why a long historical novel about Gunnhild?
And I'll be very interested in what you think of Stirling's THE STONE DOGS, and any possible allusions, analogies, connections, etc., to be found among the works of Anderson. In some ways it's more "science fictional" than the two previous Draka books.
Sean
Sean,
I will not discuss GULAG at length here because it would be a digression. It is one thing to know that a regime was brutal and used torture. It is another thing to have our noses rubbed in all the details - although it is unfortunately necessary to know all such details. I have already had some problems with Solzhenitsyn's style. I had to reread a passage to realize that it was ironic and not intended literally. My perception of the Revolution is that it was a well-intentioned revolution that went very wrong very quickly so I have to ask why - a question that S. does not address. He just (understandably) presents it as wholly bad from the very beginning.
I have discussed MOK before, of course, but will find new details to focus on.
Paul.
Sean,
On S.'s style, even the fact that the word "Archipelago" is an extended literary metaphor, not a literal description, is a bit hard to cope with. The facts chronicled are so horrific that maybe a more direct literal description would have been more appropriate.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Replying to both of your notes here.
On second thought, I agree with you, any lengthy discussion of THE GULAG ARCHIPELAGO would be out of place on a blog of this kind, devoted to discussion of the works of Poul Anderson and a few other SF writers. Your "Religion and Philosophy" blog seems to be the most appropriate venue.
IF the Russian Revolution EVER had an idealistic phase, it was during the period of the short lived Provisional Gov't of Prince George Lvov and Alexander Kerensky. According to the terms of Nicholas II's Abdication Manifesto, the Provisional Gov't was supposed to arrange for a Constituent Assembly which would determine what kind of gov't Russia would have. Unfortunately, many things occurred to abort this, such as Lenin's seizure of power in November 1917.
I admit to liking Solzhenitsyn's writing style, irony, black humor and all. I think Solzhenitsyn wrote like that because it helped him to cope with the sheer horror and brutality of the rule of Lenin and Stalin. And I sensed white hot fury by AS at how the Communists so savaged Mother Russia. In almost every possible respect Russia is far poorer and worse off than she was in 1914.
Sean
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