A relevant passage in James Blish's Mission To The Heart Stars (London, 1980), CHAPTER ELEVEN:
"'If you have an unstable culture and a short lifetime, you gain more than just personal freedom and the right to put up an argument. You gain a creativity, such as that mankind has been pouring out in torrents for most of its recorded history. The Heart Stars have lost it. I think they will never get it back.'" (p. 123)
Also comparable:
"...this was Old Wilwidh, before the machine came to impose universal sameness. It was the well-spring of Merseia. You had to see a place like this to understand, in your bones, that Merseians would never be kin to you."
-Poul Anderson, Ensign Flandry IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-192 AT CHAPTER FOURTEEN, p. 141.
and:
"'Were the peoples of the Hegemony of Malis to survive to the last moment of the heat death, they could never be brother creatures to us.'"
-Blish, op. cit., p. 125.
Finally:
"'The sea people and the land people are now to live side by side in amity and partnership, although they differ so sharply from each other that they might as easily inhabit different planets. Having made this accomodation, they are now both in a position to understand and live with other races of like mind elsewhere.'"
-Blish, p. 126.
These sea people and land people are dolphins and Earthmen but they could equally be Poul Anderson's two races of Starkadians especially when members of these latter races have to be evacuated to Imhotep.
For previous comparisons, see here.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
If my memory is correct, the Tigeries and Sea People evacuated to Imhotep from Starkad were trying to get along in their new home planet. And I think Imhotep was so different from Starkad that the two races seldom had reason to get into conflicts with each other. The lowlands of Imhotep were amply large enough that most Tigeries did not need the ocean as much as they had done on Starkad.
And did both races have MONUMENTS honoring Dominic Flandry and Emperor Georgios? After all Flandry was crucial in saving these species and Emperor Georgios must have personally approved the effort to save these races. So I would expect statues to be raised to Flandry and Georgios in the main Starkadian settlements on Imhotep.
Sean
Sean,
If only we could see it. These are details that should be added into any isual adaptation of Flandry.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I absolutely agree! Any filmed version of THE GAME OF EMPIRE should show Targovi passing statues of Flandry and Emperor Georgios as he was going to visit his mother Dragoika. It's a pity GAME makes no mention of such memorials.
Sean
If Flandry did nothing else in his career, there he saved two entire sentient species from extinction, saved all their memories and everything they might accomplish in the future.
I think he's a bit hard on himself. That's quite an accomplishment!
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I absolutely agree! And Commander Abrams said very much the same to Flandry in Chapter 18 of ENSIGN FLANDRY: "...because we came, we can save two whole thinking races and everything they might mean to the future."
And I also think Flandry (and Anderson) have sometimes been too hard on the Empire itself. Compared to most actually existing regimes, the Empire looks much better! As Abrams said a little earlier, in the same chapter, after Flandry asked in despair why they had come to Starkad when it was soon discovered it faced only ruin and death and all the Empire hoped to do was to maintain the uneasy status quo: "We had to come. The fact that we did, however futile it looked, however distant and alien and no-business-of-ours these poor people seemed, gives me a little hope for my grandchildren. We were resisting the enemy, refusing to let any aggression whatsoever go unpunished, taking the chance he presented to us wear him down. And we were proving once more to him, ourselves, to the universe, that we will not give up to him even the least of these."
Sean
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