The even-numbered "Mother of the Moon" chapters in Poul Anderson's
The Stars Are Also Fire are an extended "origin story" for the Lunarians who had been introduced in the previous volume. Anson Guthrie's granddaughter is the mother of the first Lunarians, making him their great-grandfather. History is not always that neat. However, Anderson does not oversimplify to the same extent as Isaac Asimov who has the long-lived Robot Daneel Olivaw telling Hari Seldon that the Galactic Empire is dying and persuading him to develop a predictive mathematical science of society to be called "psychohistory" long before anyone has even imagined such a science. Neither history nor science works like that. Prequels to
Foundation should have shown the young mathematician Seldon living on Trantor without any hint as yet of what was to come.
Anderson presents in several plausible stages the life of Dagny Ebbeson/Beynac and shows how her career impacts on later history.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Now I wonder if it was this habit of "oversimplifying" by Isaac Asimov which contributed to making me become dissatisfied with his works. Even if I was not able to articulate concepts in the mid 1970's. I only thought at the time of how flat, colorless, monochromatic, his novels were appearing to me. Both in their backgrounds and their thin, one dimensional characters.
I remember one critic commenting that the REAL story Asimov should have written in the section of FOUNDATION AND EMPIRE called "The General," was not the pointless and aimless adventures of the Foundation agent, but of the tragic relationship between Bel Riose and his Emperor, Cleon II. We should have seen much more about how the fears and suspicions of the last great Emperor of the First Empire led to the downfall of Bel Riose, the last great general of the Empire. We should have seen them as Bel Riose was tried before the Emperor on false charges of treason, and so on.
No, all we got were abstract statements about how a strong Emperor HAD to fear a strong general, because the latter would be tempted to rebel and make himself Emperor. Nothing about how real life is more complex than that and not all leaders would let paranoia make them miscalculate (and not all generals, even great ones, will be ambitious!).
Sean
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