decided on a whim to place Nicholas van Rijn in an earlier period of the same timeline as Dominic Flandry;
then worked hard to fit the Polesotechnic League and the Terran Empire into a single history;
discovered a theoretical framework that facilitated this speculative project.
SM Stirling commented somewhere in the combox on this blog that Anderson's unifying project kind of had a foreshortening or truncating effect on the League period. First, the League was dynamic and expanding. Then suddenly it had been having internal conflicts and difficulties for quite a while. I partially tried to address this problem in Hloch and Le Matelot, Definitive Passages and From The Beginning To The End.
12 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I'm not sure I would agree with Stirling about how Anderson's work at unifying two originally different series had a kind of "truncating" effect on the history of the Polesotechic League. If we assume, as I think is reasonable, that the League arose around AD 2200, then that gives at least three centuries for the League to show itself at its more or less best before the Mirkheim/Babur crisis of circa 2501 (using my revision of Meisel's Chronology of Technic Civilization). Three centuries seems like a very respectable for the League to exist before it started showing signs of breaking up.
Sean
Sean,
I agree with you there but there is a feeling of rushedness in the stories and in their fictional introductions, though.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
But we do get signs of the League having problems before MIRKHEIM in the earlier SATAN'S WORLD and "Lodestar." What I would have liked to have known more is what happened in the final century of the League after the Mirkheim/Babur crisis (circa AD 2501-2600). We do see Old Nick speculating that some humorless Napoleon type might eventually sweep away the remnants of the League. A military dictator arising in the dying Solar Commonwealth?
Sean
Sean,
Van Rijn's comment probably prefigures Argos.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think so. We see no mention at all of the Polesotechnic League in "The Star Plunderer." I think the remnants of the League had dissolved a century earlier. I can imagine a military dictator arising around circa AD 2600 and desperately trying to hold the Commonwealth together before we saw how it had collapsed in "Plunderer."
Sean
OK.
Sean:
But Kathryn argued with Manuel that the Commonwealth "is" democratic, and he replied that the Commonwealth was gone now. If there WAS a military dictator toward the end, he or she must have kept up a pretense of still serving a democratic government, to the point that even military officers of high intelligence continued to believe in it.
We can discuss Technic History politics in almost as much detail as real world politics. We want a novel set in the last days of the Commonwealth among many other things.
Kaor, DAVID and Paul!
David, yes, I recall that discussion of Kathryn with the ruthlessly pragmatic Manuel Argos in "Plunderer" (which I like to imagine was set in about AD 2690). Given how shattered the Commonwealth was by then, what passed for "democracy" was not worth much!
And many real world dictators HAVE kept up the forms of the gov'ts they overthrew, no matter how farcical that was in many cases. But I can imagine some dictators and their subordinates still wistfully believing in the old institutions and political norms and even trying to revive them. That might have happened before the events seen in "The Star Plunderer" (btw, I liked the original title "Collar of Iron" better).
Paul: I agree! And I would have settled for one or two short stories set in the waning days of the Polesotechnic League and the Commonwealth. Actually, we do, but those stories were set on the planet Avalon.
And I did a bit of analyzing of Imperial politics in my attempt to read between the lines in my "The Widow Of Georgios" note.
Sean
Sean:
I'm pretty sure I've mentioned this before here, but a couple of decades ago I was working up the backstory for a future history of my own. (It owed a lot to PA and H. Beam Piper, and to a lesser degree Isaac Asimov.)
One item in that chronology was a brief dictatorship in the mid-21st-Century USA. I specifically stated that the dictator "didn’t seize power in an actual coup, but received martial law authority" [in 2023] "in the chaotic aftermath of World War III and the invasions" [by Québec, independent of Canada, and Mexico]. "By the time, in 2035, that martial law was no longer necessary, he had become accustomed to its efficiency as compared to democracy. He was, however, unwilling to shed the semblance of legitimate appointment by the President and Congress, and so maintained a pseudo-democratic structure."
After the dictator died, his puppet politicians managed to restore something approximating a real democratic republic. Known as Pan America once it took over the entirety of the Western Hemisphere, this was still functioning about 150 years later during World War V.
David,
Thank you for further details.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID!
Many thanks for telling us the very interesting details of the story you thought of writing. As I've said, I can imagine some dictators being unwilling to wholly discard older forms of gov't.
I do wonder how easy it would be restore a gov't in which the US was actually governed by the President and Congress. Wouldn't the dictator's friends and supporters at least think of trying to preserve the new governing structure he had, de facto, built up?
Sean
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