This blog is currently juggling three cross-time interactions:
The Domination and Ingolfsson Incursion timelines;
the FirstSide and New Virginia timelines;
the Old Phoenix.
On p. 1 of The Domination, the Earth of the Ingolfsson Incursion timeline is designated "Earth/2B." Why not just "Earth/2"? Has there been some further temporal divergence?
Our NYPD detective has become:
"The richest man in the world..." (ibid.)
We are not told whether his girl friend is still around.
IngolfTech, now controlled by homo sapiens, has revolutionized Earth and the Solar System and has joined with Sony to launch an interstellar probe by 2014.
Henry Carmaggio speaks to a Japanese researcher called Nomura Takashi. Is this an echo of Tom Nomura in Poul Anderson's Time Patrol? Stirling's Nomura thinks that the Master Race is "'...a fatuous concept!'" (p. 3) and that:
"'Surely any culture possessed by a concept so illogical would be defeated, as the Nazis were.'" (ibid.)
I agree. However:
Henry warns Nomura not to generalize from too small a sample;
Stirling precisely invites us to imagine such a culture succeeding.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I find it very interesting you obtained a copy of THE DOMINATION, collecting the first three Draka books. I might have purchased one myself if the appendices had not been omitted. The interesting framing device by itself did not seem to justify me buying it. Perhaps I should have.
And I agree with Henry Carmaggio, it's dangerous and foolish to complacently assume that nothing as monstrous and evil as the Draka and their Domination could never arise. The thing to remember about the Draka, as Stirling developed them, was that they are INTELLIGENT tyrants who avoided making the stupid, counterproductive, and wasteful mistakes of the Nazis and Soviets.
Hmmm, intriguing to think NOMURA Takashi was possibly an allusion by Stirling to Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories.
Sean
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