in North America, propagandists of capital and labor generated a reaction against them and contributed to "'...the mass-psychological debacle that led to military defeat.'" (p. 40);
tyrannical and ideologically blinkered commissars never questioned their own dogmas;
the liberators were soon as unpopular;
there was an Interregnum with warlords and psychomilitary analysts, then a theocracy threatened by the Mongku Empire;
Venus conquered Earth and deposed the American theocrats;
formulated psychodynamics with a field and tensor approach "'...was used to bring on the Mars-Venus war and unify the Solar System...'" (p. 41);
now the economic cycle is controlled, cities are distributed efficiently, the currency is stabilized and mankind moves away from barbarism towards a mature civilization where everyone is sane because good intentions are combined with some knowledge of how to implement them.
Some of the details sound like Robert Heinlein's Future History.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Whoa!!! A colonized VENUS conquered Earth? THAT bemuses me! And you already know of my skepticism that a "science of man" is even possible or desirable. And even in the rather early QUESTION AND ANSWER we see Poul Anderson deciding such a thing was more undesirable than not.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
And the bit about American theocrats being deposed reminds me of Robert Heinlein's Nehemiah Scudder and REVOLT IN 2100. I have commented elsewhere that I was skeptical of these notions of Heinlein because I don't think tyranny in the US will take the form of some kind of Protestant theocracy. And also because Christianity is poor and stony land for theocracy.
I think Anderson gave us more plausible hints of what a Protestant oriented regime might be like in a few stories like "The Bitter Bread." We see mention of an "Absolute Christian Church" and Protectors like Enoch IV and David III in that story. But more like a kind of monarchy with an "established" church. A notion familiar in the UK!
Sean
Sean,
Both the American theocracy and the first mature civilization are straight out of Heinlein.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
No surprise! Poul Anderson has mentioned how impressed he was by Heinlein's Future History, and it influenced some of his earlier works.
Sean
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