Carl Donnan's humanoid Kandemirian captor says, "'Ah, so.'" (p. 76) - and thus sounds Japanese. This plus an American at war far from home recalls World War II, as in High Treason. For impacts of World War II on Anderson's fiction, see World War II. For similarities to occupied Europe, see An Occupied Planet and Flandry On Vixen.
With their long history of armed conflicts on Earth, the Terrestrials have something to contribute to their local civilization-cluster with its long drawn out struggle between two imperial powers, Kandemir and Vorlak. However, interstellar wars are rare.
Within a cluster:
"There was trading... There was tourism. There was a degree of interchange in science, art, religion, fashion. Sometimes there was war." (CHAPTER THREE, p. 34)
But:
"The civilization-clusters were never hostile to each other. There was nothing to be hostile about. Conflicts occurred among neighbours, not among strangers who saw each other once a year, a decade, or a century." (ibid.)
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think it would need a passionately held philosophical or at least ideological conflict to make a long drawn interstellar conflict or war plausible. Two examples from Anderson's Technic series being the ideology of racial supremacy which dominated Merseia during the Roidhunate and the Cosmenosism on the planet Aeneas which Aycharaycn tried to nurse and foment into a jihad which would have shattered the Terran Empire.
Interested readers might look up, if they wish, my article "Was The Domination Inspired By Merseia?" for a closer look at Merseian racial supremacism.
Or an interstellar conflict might erupt from one power being merely aggressively expansionist, like Kandemir in AFTER DOOMSDAY. But, I don't recall Kandemir being fanatically IDEOLOGICAL about it. In fact, I recall Kandemirians being described as being pretty decent and fairly mild rulers. I can only speak from memory, it being a long time since I last read AFTER DOOMSDAY.
I'm a slow reader, but I've finally finished the second of the four HARVEST OF STARS books (THE STARS ARE ALSO FIRE). And I plan to begin rereading the third volume: HARVEST THE FIRE today.
Sean
That's more or less like Earth. There have been few wars between Switzerland and Tibet, or Sweden and China -- but many between France and Germany, or Denmark and Sweden.
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