When there had been a Second World War, the Great War became the First. If future history has a Renaissance, then the Renaissance in our history will become the First. Merely by using this phrase, "First Renaissance," Poul Anderson evokes a comparable creative period in his History of Technic Civilization.
Falkayn sees "...a Tyrian sky..." (ibid.) Readers of Anderson's Time Patrol series are familiar with Tyre. Apparently, there can be a Mediterranean blue sky in the Ikranankan Twilight Zone because the planet librates.
Twilight Zoners experience seasonal changes and therefore have a standard polytheistic religion with benevolent gods, divine death, annual rebirth and defeat of the evil one. This makes them easier for van Rijn and the League to do business with than the permanently paranoid Daysiders. In fact, the Twilight Zone sounds like fertile ground for Christian missionaries: polytheism + Occam's Razor = monotheism?
Falkayn thinks that Buddhist missionaries will subvert Daysider dystopianism by offering a more comfortable message than dismal demonology. (There is a Tibetan story about a Buddhist teacher taming the local deities.) The self-knowledge of meditation is often uncomfortable but more truthful and helpful than belief in demons of chaos.
3 comments:
Paul:
You may be correct about the sky's color, but I took "Tyrian" in this instance to refer instead to the hue of the dye named for the city: Tyrian PURPLE. It never crossed my mind that Falkayn might have been so impressed with the color of the sky specifically at Tyre that it'd come to his mind over 200 light-years away.
Of course, Tyre WAS a highly mercantile city, so it could have particular significance to a Polesotechnic trader, almost like a pilgrimage to his spiritual roots.... But there's the fact that it's a TWILIGHT Zone — always SUNSET. I'd expect THAT to be the crimson or purple shade that my Merriam-Webster tells me "Tyrian purple" describes.
David,
You are right about the "Tyrian color." I did wonder whether an Inkrsnankan sky could be blue.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul and DAVID!
Paul: well, for daysiders on Ikrananka, it is permanently daylight. For both the Katandaran Empire and the desert tribes harassing it, a never ending day would be a good reason for both paranoia and fear of demons.
Yes, Falkayn did wonder if van Rijn could do better to deal with Rangakora instead of the Katandaran Empire. But he quickly dismissed that because the former was merely a city state with limited resources while the Empire commanded the goods and resources of a vastly larger part of the planet. But Falkayn managed to find a way for everybody to gain more from compromising than by continued bellicosity.
Sean
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