"'Let's hope the threat that I may try again will force them to govern better...back there.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 367-520 AT Chapter Sixteen, p. 514.
McCormac will not return but do some Aeneans hope that he will? "He will return" is a persistent myth. When I was at boarding school in Scotland, some pupils said, "Charlie will come again!," meaning Bonnie Prince Charlie. Someone replied, "Aye, Charlie Chaplin!"
Charles Stewart Parnell (scroll down) is a guest in Poul Anderson's Old Phoenix and, in James Joyce's Ulysses (?) (Later: Or A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man?), a character says wistfully that they say it was only rocks in his coffin when he was buried...
There is an sf series (titles and author's name forgotten) where a space military/naval establishment finds its official hero in suspended animation, then has to cope with the difference between the real person and the image of him.
In CS Lewis' Narnia, the ancient Kings and Queens return and, in his Ransom Trilogy, Merlin returns but it is unnecessary to multiply examples.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Just one example of a hero from Anderson's works "returning." We see Holger Carlsen, who was actually Holger Danske, returning in THREE HEARTS AND THREE LIONS in an hour of dire need when mankind and the Empire needed him.
Sean
Paul:
I suspect the series you cited, about the hero who doesn't match later generations' image of him, is The Lost Fleet by Jack Campbell, alias of John G. Hemry. I've mentioned it before on this blog. The big problem was that they'd used his heroic Last Stand (in the only battle of his career before re-awakening) to justify "tactics" resembling those of the French knights at Agincourt, and devoted to competing with each other for glory rather than working together for victory.
When he advocated teamwork and maneuvering as opposed to headlong glory-hound charges, some of them argued that his time in "survival hibernation" had destroyed the aspects of his character that were worth emulating. A growing number, though, realized that he was BETTER than the legend. The war had gone on 100 years before he came back. He won it in about six months. (Of course, that was because the enemy, too, had lost the knowledge of tactics.)
Randall Garrett wrote a story, "The Highest Treason," about a man who deliberately set himself up as a particularly vile traitor, and then killed himself in a way that left no body to be found, exactly so the fear that he might still be alive and return to do more evil would keep humanity from backsliding into complacency.
David,
That is it.
Paul.
Kaor, DAVID!
That was it, THE LOST FLEET! I knew it had been discussed here, but couldn't recall what Paul was trying to remember. So many SF books I've not read!
Yes, planning, sound organization, taking care of logistics, sensible tacticts, those are far better ways of winning a war than "glory hounding." And less damaging for both sides.
Sean
There's a joke... which might become a myth... that Teddy Roosevelt and the Rough Riders are sleeping under Mount Rushmore, waiting to return at the hour of America's need.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
And if the US lasts long enough, we might actually come to get legends like that!
Sean
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