"'...there are live prisoners. Would you let them be slaves? Blinded and chained to millstones...?'" (Chapter 6, p. 70)
This recalls:
Eyeless in Gaza, at the mill with slaves,
-line 41, copied from here.
I referred to "Eyeless in Gaza" in:
In Gaza
God And Dog
SM Stirling's fiction features several callous slave-owners - but so does our history.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I think we see two kinds of slavery in most fictional works: one is what I might call casual/taken for granted, everybody does it slavery; the other (and far worse) a deliberately systematized and expanded slavery complete with an ideology justifying it (as with Stirling's Draka). The first kind of slavery can be abolished when changes in faith, philosophy, technology more and more makes it untenable. A Draka style system would be far harder to eliminate or destroy!
Sean
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