Military Technology

Poul Anderson, The High Crusade, CHAPTER IV.

Anderson has to inform us of some arbitrary facts of military technology:

the ship's fire-beams would be able to "'...reduce a city to slag...'" (p. 30);

however, Wersgor cities are protected by force screens;

but the ship lacks such screens because the screen generators would be too bulky for it to carry.

We are used to FTL warcraft protecting themselves with force screens. It sounds as though the ship, on arrival, will be vulnerable to attack from a planetary surface. However, Anderson will arrange matters so that the Earthmen can turn the tables. Human superiority is a familiar theme in sf although Anderson, covering every option, writes in other works about human inferiority.

More than a thousand years later, a descendant of these fourteenth century Englishmen will say:

"'I'd have loved a fresh crusade. Life's been dull since we conquered the Dragons ten years ago.'" (EPILOGUE, p. 160)

This sense of crusades as an adventure is shared by Lorenzo de Conti in Anderson's The Shield Of Time. However, these feudal conquerors are nowhere near as oppressive as Anderson's Merseians, Larry Niven's kzinti or SM Stirling's Draka.