There is a reference to a "Father Flandry" in SM Stirling's Black Chamber, TEN, p. 204. An ancestor of Poul Anderson's Dominic Flandry? No. Father Flandry is a celibate Catholic priest and not in the same timeline as Dominic. But there could be a third timeline in which they are directly related.
In the Black Chamber timeline, Nikola Tesla works for President Theodore Roosevelt's National Advanced Research Projects Institute. We anticipate rapid technological advances in the twentieth century of that timeline.
In Lancaster Real, I will visit Ketlan on the Marsh Estate and attend the Zen group at the Friends' Meeting House tomorrow and meet the guys in the Gregson on Wednesday and we will have a big family birthday party here at Blades Street (scroll down) on Saturday. As ever, I strive to blog.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Now that is very cool, Stirling making an Andersonian allusion like that: a Fr. FLANDRY! As for Dominic Flandry himself, we can speculate that he had COLLATERAL ancestors who may have been priests.
And I will be interested to see how Stirling handles Nikola Tesla, a truly protean genius a la Leonardo da Vinci (see Anderson's story "The Light").
I hope Ketlan is doing better. And have a good time on the other matters you mentioned.
Sean
Sean,
Thank you. Ketlan's current condition is improving.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Good, that is excellent. My good wishes to Ketlan!
And this "Fr. Flandry" we see in Stirling's BLACK CHAMBER is not the first time we see a Flandry in one of his books. We see an "Ensign Dominique Flandry" in one of the British Naval ships in the Change series. Just after Sir Nigel Loring had rescued Crown Prince William from Moorish pirates attacking the CUTTY SARK.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
I looked up Nikol Tesla and was surprised to find out he was born in 1856, in the Habsburg Monarchy. And emigrated to the US only in 1884, when his employer suggested it. That has made me wonder what might have happened if he had remained in Austria-Hungary. Would he have had a more successful career there?
Both Leonardo da Vinci and Nikola Tesla seem to have been alike in some ways: geniuses who never seemed to have been quite able to carry out in a practical way all they had invented or speculated about. So I wonder if Tesla might have found a more sympathetic reception for his ideas in Austria-Hungary, in our timeline. I get the impression Theodore Roosevelt gave him a freer hand in the US of Stirling's BLACK CHAMBER.
And I'm reminded again of Poul Anderson's Leonardo da Vinci stories, "The Light" and "House Rule."
Sean
Glad to hear Ketlan is doing better!
Nicolai Tesla was severely mentally compromised -- OCD, auditory and visual hallucinations, the whole nine yards.
He was also a genius of the first water. His mental stability wavered right on the edge of making him non-functional.
The business side of inventing seems to have stressed Tesla over the edge into non-functionality in the end. What he needed was a patron who would let him go off and play with lots of funds, only an occasional general instruction ("what about X?") and no worries about patents and lawsuits.
In the BLACK CHAMBER timeline, he gets such a patron. There was a lot of low-hanging technological fruit in the 1910's, things that just needed some concentrated R&D work by scientists or engineers to produce spectacular results.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Thanks for your very interesting comments about Nikolai Tesla. You made much plainer what I was mentally groping for, that in BLACK CHAMBER Theodore Roosevelt became precisely the kind of patron Tesla needed. I'll reading with great interest about the Tesla did in BLACK CHAMBER that he might have done in our timeline if matters had been different.
Sean
"Nicolai Tesla was severely mentally compromised -- OCD, auditory and visual hallucinations, the whole nine yards.
"He was also a genius of the first water. His mental stability wavered right on the edge of making him non-functional."
Philosophers.
As Sir Terry Pratchett portrayed a character saying, in Small Gods:
"If you spend your whole time thinking about the universe, you tend to forget the less important bits of it. Like your pants. And ninety-nine out of a hundred ideas they come up with are totally useless.... One minute it's all Is Truth Beauty and Is Beauty Truth, and Does a Falling Tree in the Forest Make a Sound if There's No one There to Hear It, and then just when you think they're going to start dribbling one of 'em says, Incidentally, putting a thirty-foot parabolic reflector on a high place to shoot the rays of the sun at an enemy's ships would be a very interesting demonstration of optical principles.... The one before that was some intricate device that demonstrated the principles of leverage by incidentally hurling balls of burning sulfur two miles. Then before that, I think, there was some kind of an underwater thing that shot sharpened logs into the bottom of ships."
Kaor, DAVID!
And let's not forget how Jonathan SWift satirized inventors in GULLIVER'S TRAVELS! My view is we need both philosophers and inventors, even if both kinds of men sometimes come up with hopelessly useless ideas.
Sean
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