-Poul Anderson, Murder In Black Letter, Chapter 16.
Here is another intrusion of an sf author's perspective into a mystery novel. How often does anyone in a contemporary novel, or in real life, look out a window and think of what is beyond the window as a "planet"? Blue and green are ubiquitous enough. In fact, it suddenly seems appropriate to quote Leon Trotsky (sometimes, I do not know where I am going when I start a post):
"I can see the bright green strip of grass beneath the wall, and the clear blue sky above the wall, and sunlight everywhere. Life is beautiful. Let the future generations cleanse it of all evil, oppression, and violence and enjoy it to the full." (See here.)
Looking, with Trotsky, to the future, I hope that mankind will avoid Anderson's Terran Empire and I have suggested a Terrestrial tricolor.
How tangential can I get? Yamamura and Kintyre are solving a murder while I pause to discuss the phrase, "...blue and green planet."
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I would admire Trotsky more IF he had not bloodied his hands so much with innocent blood in the Russian Revolution, Civil War, and dictatorship of Lenin.
As fictional states go, I don't find the Terran Empire that bad. I've said this repeatedly, compared to many actual regimes, past and present, the Empire looks VERY good. Perhaps like a combination of the US and UK.
Sean
Sean,
What I do like about the Terran Empire is that its member planets can have any social form that they want provided that they pay modest taxes.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree, because that was the only way the Empire could WORK, tolerance of almost any kind of socio/political system as long as they lived in peach with their neighbors and paid modest tribute to the Imperium.
We see Dominic Flandry making very similar comments in THE REBEL WORLDS, where he discussed how the Empire had many races with some very strange social arrangements. And how they tend to think humans were very odd themselves! (Smiles)
Sean
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