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"'Tell the monster here what I said, anyway.'
"'My lord, it isn't true!'
"'Ah, but we'll make it come true; so 'tis no lie after all.'
"I choked on the casuistry but rendered it as required of me.'" (CHAPTER XVI, p. 116)
The tide of battle had turned in CHAPTER XIV. Sir Roger began with superior military tactics against antagonists who had long forgotten how to fight with knives and fists. In that chapter, he captured large numbers of easy-to-operate weapons and spaceships and thus became the formidable space-traversing opponent that he had claimed to be all along.
In CHAPTER XVI, he has flown to another planetary system where he is building an alliance with three other races against the Wersgorix. In two quantum leaps, the entire nature of the conflict has changed irrevocably.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And Poul Anderson manages to make me think such an implausible scenario is just barely possible, given some luck and a leader as bold, daring, and imaginative as Sir Roger.
Real world analogies such as Hernando Cortez's conquest of the Aztec Empire and Francisco Pizarro's triumph over the Incas comes to mind. By all rights the Aztecs and Incas, with so many resources to draw on, should have defeated the Spanish. Many factors, of course, lay behind the Spanish conquest, but the sheer ability, daring, audacity, and wiliness of Cortez and Pizarro were among them. We get a good glimpse of that in Anderson's story "The Year of the Ransom."
Sean
Paul and Sean:
Randall Garrett wrote a novella, "Despoilers of the Golden Empire," which describes Pizarro's conquest of Peru in terms that make it sound like space opera. The troops of "Commander Frank" carry "power weapons" and their search is for "the power metal," "Element Number Seventy-nine." (It's acknowledged that this is gold, but the way Garrett phrases his description still makes it sound as if the empire has learned to use this as some manner of nuclear fuel.) "Without the power metal, no ship could move or even be built; without it, industry would come to a standstill."
Kaor, DAVID!
An interesting recasting of the Spanish conquest of Peru! And sheer lust for that power metal was a strong motivator "fueling" the reckless audacity of the Spanish.
Sean
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