Poul Anderson, The Game Of Empire IN Flandry's Legacy, pp. 189-453.
Dominic Flandry would like to have lived in the Second Sugimoto. (The Game..., Chapter Twelve, p. 320). Does anyone know what this is?
Coexisting with the Terran Empire and the Merseian Roidhunate, there is not only a Domain of Ythri and a Dispersal of Ymir but also a Realm of Gorrazan. (p. 323) We knew of the Gorrazani but not perhaps that they inhabited a "Realm."
Anderson cleverly deploys autumnal imagery yet again. See here.
Magnusson says that the Terran rescue mission to Merseia disrupted the Merseian social order and enriched itself off the Merseians' tragedy. (The Game..., Chapter Eighteen, p. 397) An interesting historical interpretation of an earlier instalment in the Technic History.
Flandry echoes Manse Everard and other Time Patrol agents:
"'...occasionally a pivotal event does happen.'" (The Game..., Chapter Twelve, p. 322)
"'...every so often, a small change does make a big difference.'" (The Game..., Chapter Eighteen, p. 394)
"Nexus points do occur, where it matters how the dice fell." (Time Patrol, p. 424)
"'That's a critical point in a critical timespan.'" (Time Patrol, p. 751)
Are there time travellers, unknown to us, in the Technic History? At some moment in cosmic history, a causality violation or a quantum fluctuation might make the difference between the Technic History and the Danellian timeline.
In A Stone..., Miriam Abrams is forty-four (II, p. 20) and Dominic Flandry is sixty-one (III, p. 29). In The Game..., he is approaching seventy whereas she is approaching fifty (Chapter Twelve, p. 318) These data have to be incorporated into any proposed Chronology of the Technic History. See here.
Comparing Two Series
Ian Fleming wrote a new James Bond novel each year and kept them contemporaneous. Thus, Bond aged at most a year between volumes and, later in the series, Fleming revised the earlier chronology, thus cutting perhaps a decade off Bond's life.
By contrast, the Dominic Flandry series is set over a thousand years in the future and covers Flandry's career from Ensign to Fleet Admiral. Thus, fourteen years elapse between A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and A Stone In Heaven. We would like to read about every year of Flandry's life but this was not possible.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I've tried myself to find out when and where the Second Sugimoto occurred, but with only doubtful results. Anderson may have meant the first part of the Ashikaga Shogunate of Japan (formally established in 1338), before the Onin War destroyed the authority of the Ashikaga shoguns. During the early Ashikaga Shogunate Japan was esp. open to foreign influences.
Sean
Paul and Sean:
My personal feeling about the "Second Sugimoto" is that it refers to a period of the Terran Empire's history when a dynasty with the family name Sugimoto was in power, and Flandry felt things were particularly good under the second emperor of that line.
I just don't see Dominic Flandry as being all that enchanted by a pre-motorized, much less pre-electronic, culture such as 14th-century Japan.
By Sean's calculations, there's some 400 years between Manuel founding the Empire and Flandry's birth, so there's time for a Sugimoto line, if only a short one. The Wang dynasty lasted only to the fifth, and who knows how many Argolids there were before THEY ceased to be emperors?
Kaor, DAVID!
Thanks for your very interesting comments! I had never wondered if the Argolids were succeeded not by the Wang Dynasty but by a possibly short lived Sugimoto ruling house. I had thought the Argolids and Wangs were the only Imperial dynasties of Terra before Hans Molitor's reluctant usurpation of the crown.
NOW I have to wonder if what Flandry meant by "Second Sugimoto" was the dynasty preceding the Wangs. Personally, I'm doubtful that was the case. I still get the "feeling" that what Flandry meant was a period within the history of Japan. But I agree that if push came to shove, I doubt Flandry would like to live in so technologically primitive a time as the Ashikaga Shogunate.
And I would ague that the Wang Dynasty comprised six, not five Emperors. We see mention of how the Policy Board split over accepting Josip's successor in A KNIGHT OF GHOSTS AND SHADOWS. Which I interpreted as meaning Josip was briefly succeeded by his Wang heir presumptive.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
It's fun for SF fans like us to speculate that agents of the Time Patrol may have been active in the Technic Civilization timeline. MY suspicion, in that case, would be to think the Patrol "deleted" the Technic Timeline because it was not part of the "history" leading to the Danellians. And you have convincingly argued that such "deleted" timelines were not snuffed out--rather, they became inaccessible to the Time Patrol.
But this would only be fan boy speculations on our part! Anderson wisely, in my opinion, did not try to link up the Technic Civilization stories with the Patrol series. Because I think that would have created a hopeless mess of tangled contradictions and implausibly strained "reconciliation" of plots. Which is what I believe happened when Isaac Asimov linked up his Robot stories with the Galactic Empire/Foundation series.
Sean
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