"...Intelligence... the whole navy, the whole Empire... was spread too thin across a reach too vast, inhuman, hostile; in the end, perhaps all striving to keep the Peace of Man was barren."
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT Chapter IX, p. 546.
And Manse Everard often reflects that the Time Patrol has too few personnel to guard more than a million years of history.
In both series, intelligent beings strive to conserve order that they have won from chaos. The two series address the vastnesses of Space and Time, respectively.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
However ultimately impossible and doomed to failure the effort might be to preserve some kind of peace and order, I believe the struggle still has to be made--if only because, for a while, there WAS some kind of peace and order. I'm reminded of these anxious reflections of Dominic Flandry at Admiralty Center, in Chapter II of THE REBEL WORLDS (italics used in the original text): "Hustle, bustle, hurry, scurry, run, run, run," said his glumness. "Work, for the night is coming--the Long Night, when the Empire goes under and the howling peoples camp in its ruins. Because how can we remain forever the masters, even of our insignificant spatter of stars, on the fringe of a galaxy so big we'll never know a decent fraction of it? Probably never more than this sliver of one spiral arm that we've already seen." And in the next paragraph: "Our ancestors explored further than we in these years remember. When hell cut loose and their civilization seemed about to fly into pieces, they patched it together with the Empire. And they made the Empire function. But we...we've lost the will. We've had it too easy for too long. And so the Merseians on our Betelgeusean flank, the wild races everywhere else, press inward..."
Sean
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