Great political negotiators in Poul Anderson's works are:
Gratillonius, King of Ys;
Nicholas van Rijn, Master Merchant Polesotechnic League;
Dagny Beynac, "The Mother of the Moon."
(Van Rijn is not a politician but has to deal with them.)
Dagny displays van Rijn's ability to find common ground between groups with opposed interests:
it will be less costly for the Selenarchs and Fireball to settle Terran Moondwellers elsewhere in the Solar System than to fight them;
the Selenarchs might exchange some of their asteroidal holdings for the Lunar helium-3 extraction works instead of merely expropriating the works which would force the beleaguered Federation government to wage war, insane though that would be in the circumstances;
download Dagny explains Federation governmental psychology to living Dagny's ninety year old son, the Selenarch Brandir.
We first encountered living Dagny as a teenager pregnant with her first son, not Brandir. History has happened during the novel and there are still ten chapters to reread but not tonight, folks.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree with your list of the master negotiators to be found in the works of Poul Anderson. I've wondered if Baron Roger de Tourneville, whom we meet in THE HIGH CRUSADE, should be included.
Sean
Sean,
I can't remember him but I can't take THE HIGH CRUSADE seriously alongside the others. But I will reread it eventually. But everything is very eventual here.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree that, when compared to many others of his works, THE HIGH CRUSADE is more light hearted, still it does show Baron Roger to be a shrewd and wily politicians. Which necessarily means he also knew how to negotiate and bargain.
I also wondered if Chunderban Desai, high commissioner of the Virgilian system for the Terran Empire in THE DAY OF THEIR RETURN, should be on this list. Esp. when you read this job description of commissioners from Chapter 3 of that book: "His Majesty's administrators must forever be dickering, compromising, feeling their way, balancing conflicts of individuals, organizations, societies, races, sentient species. The need for skill--quickly to grasp facts, comprehend a situation, brazen out a bluff when in spite of everything the unknown erupted into one's calculations--was greatest at the intermediate level of bureaucracy which he had reached. A resident might dealt with a single culture, and have no more to do than keep an eye on affairs. A sector governor oversaw such vastness that to him it became a set of abstractions. But the various ranks of commissioners were expected to handle personally large and difficult territories."
I don't often see many SF writers giving that kind of careful thought to HOW an interstellar realm might be administered, given a FTL drive!
Sean
Sean,
I am sure that Desai is as capable but I don't think that we see him having to negotiate between opposed groups and factions in the way that van Rijn etc do.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Maybe not as DIRECTLY as we see Old Nick doing in various stories, but that was Desai's job on Aeneas.
Sean
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