wins respect and good will from the Tigeries;
gathers new information about this Starkadian species;
presents well organized data to Commander Abrams of Intelligence;
devises easily made gadgets to keep a Seatroll prisoner healthy;
thus, delivers a live prisoner for interrogation by Intelligence.
When Abrams withholds information from Hauksberg's party because they are en route to the enemy's home planet, Hauksberg laughs and says:
"'I've never been called a blabbermouth more tactfully.'"
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT Chapter Five, p. 44.
This reminded me of something that Manse Everard thought in response to diplomatic language from a Confucian scholar:
(vi) A Confucian scholar says, "'I am a stranger and ignorant...Forgive me if I do not understand your talk of irresistible weapons.'" (p. 144) Everard thinks, "Which is the politest way I've ever been called a liar..." (ibid.) More humor, I think. Excellent scholarly Diplomatese.
-copied from here.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And one of the reasons Abrams was so delighted to get a live prisoner from the Sea People was because this offered a means of learning more about them, and even of getting into touch with the Sea People fighting the Kursovikians.
Sean
Winston Churchill once remarked: "Even when you have to kill a man, it costs nothing to be polite."
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Which reminds me of the elaborate courtesies soldiers and knights have sometimes shown each other even in combat. And I've seen similar things in some of your own Change books, such as the time Lord Bear accepted a challenge to single combat by a young knight of the Protector--who greeted Mike Havel with great respect.
Sean
By the way, Abrams is also using the "need to know" principle; you don't tell people anything they don't need to know to do their jobs. They can't reveal what they don't know.
This makes briefing subordinates a nightmare in Intelligence work, btw, because you always have to balance reducing effectiveness against telling more than you have to.
Paranoid hoarding of information is the occupational disease of clandestine work.
It's been found on the military side that it always pays to brief each level of command (down to sergeants, who brief their squads) on what the -aim- of an operation is and what the -intentions- of the planners are. This enables subordinates to improvise in a way that fits into the overall plan.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I can well imagine how that can be a problem, balancing the need to know principle with the need to also not reveal too much. I discussed how a paranoid hoarding of information could explain a contradiction I discovered from comparing THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN with "Honorable Enemies" in my "Unexpected Contradiction" note. Of course I was merely trying to rationalize a contradiction I found!
Sean
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