Known Space, Anderson's Psychotechnic and Technic Histories and James Blish's single volume pantropy future history have in common that each of these four series culminates in a single story set in a remoter future when it seems that at least some of the earlier conflicts have been resolved. Niven's Thousand Worlds is utopian.
An interstitial passage by Sandra Miesel in The Long Night gives us our single clue as to the ultimate fate of Merseia:
"Terra and Merseia wore each other into oblivion. Their exhausted dominions were devastated by rebellions from within and attacks from without. By the middle of the fourth millennium, the fearful Long Night fell."
-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Long Night (New York, 1983), p. 132.
I think that the demoralization of Merseia began with the defeat of their attempted subversion of the Terran Empire at the end of Anderson's The Game Of Empire. Miesel's passages can point us in a direction but answers must be sought in Anderson's texts.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I suggested in one of my letters to Poul Anderson that not all of the Empire might have fallen in the ways suggested by Miesel. A part of the Empire might have survived in ways analogous to how the Eastern Roman Empire survived for a thousand years in our real history.
Sean
Indeed. There might have been numerous claimants to the "T E" name. Also, I would think that out of 100,000 inhabited worlds, many wouldn't have been attacked- neither strategically located nor possessing much of value, such as the town in New Mexico where I grew up.
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
And as the example of Nike shows, in "A Tragedy of Errors," there were people on some of the planets of the fallen Empire who arrogated the Imperial title and claimed to be "Emperor" of at least that world.
But I did wonder if a part of the Empire survived as the Eastern Roman Empire had done three centuries or so after Flandry's time.
Sean
The Terran Empire (and the Roidhunate) are both probably about as big as political units can get. At its height, the Roman Empire, which is the model for the Terran Empire, probably encompassed about 1/3 of the human race; significantly bigger units (like the Mongols) tend to fracture faster.
Asimov's Galactic Empire is impossible and Asimov created it only because he wrongly believed that a Galactic population would make a predictive science of society possible.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: If the Romans had grasped the possibilities of steam power, because of the experiments in Alexandria with steam powered machines indicated, they might have hit on the idea of RAIL ROADS. Given the more rapid communications, shipping of bulk goods, and transportation of large numbers of people (including Legions), I can see the Roman Empire taking over Germany and expanding eastwards at least as far as what is now Russia.
People have speculated that slavery made labor so cheap that the Romans had no inclination to investigate labor saving steam powered machines.
Paul: And we see Asimov moving away from that impossible idea of using mathematics/large poulations making a predictive science of society possible in his later FOUNDATION books, both the prequel and the sequels.
Sean
Kaor, Sean!
In real history, railroads existed, to a very limited extent, before steam railroads; a team of horses or oxen could pull a wagon point A to point B faster and with less effort if it were running on rails. However, this was a later development; I’m not aware of the Romans having had any sort or railroads.
If some Roman had decided to try to make more practical use of the steam engine which was used to perform temple miracles in Alexandria, could he have gotten far with it? Possibly, but perhaps not. It’s questionable whether Roman metallurgy and machining would have been up to making steam engines that were good for very much (they had enough problems with leakage and occasional explosions in the 18th and 19th centuries). Also, would Romans have been able to obtain enough fuel (wood and charcoal) to make steam powered equipment competitive with the tool of slaves and animals? By the time steam engines became important in our history, Europe had had various other developments: mining coal for fuel, building and improving windmills, mechanical clocks, and other devices. Granted, the Romans could certainly do engineering, they used water power, and the Antikythera computer suggests that they or some of their subjects could make clockwork devices, so perhaps they could have built on that. On the other hand, their culture didn’t seem to put much value on that kind of inventiveness; it was socially prestigious to be a statesman, a Stoic or Platonic thinker, or a successful general, but not, as I understand it, an artisan or inventor.
And then, if the Roman Empire had become more technologically advanced, would it have endured, or would recurrent civil wars and other social problems have ended up just making it fall nonetheless? One can imagine the barbarians getting their hands on improved technology as well, by serving in the Roman army, imitating things they saw, conquering provinces where railroads and factories were in use, and so on.
Best Regards,
Nicholas
Actually, slaves weren't very cheap in Rome, with a few brief exceptions (after major wars). An ordinary unskilled male adult consistently cost about 3-4 years worth of a free unskilled laborer's wages, and this was very stable right across Roman history.
It probably took at least 6 years for him to earn back his purchase price..
Call it the equivalent of say $80,000 -- $100,000 today; and of course you have to count the 'opportunity cost' of the investment and a premium for risk. If the slave died, or got sick, you were out of pocket.
The primary reason for using slaves was that they were controllable and available, not that they were particularly cheap. In Classical times, free men generally wouldn't work consistently for someone else under supervision -- even an "executive" position like an estate manager was dangerously like slave's work, leading to severe loss of status. Free men would do brief spells of work for contract, or rent land, but they wouldn't be an employee in our sense of the word.
The Hellenistic Greeks had steam powered toys, but they had no understanding of pressure mechanics, atmospheric weights, and so forth. Additionally, their steam toys were rotary, not reciprocating, and they didn't have the metalworking capacity to make large cylinders anyway. That was the limiting factor on the development of steam engines in the 18th century, when the principles began to be understood. It took Watt 10 years, spending heavily in the most advanced metalworking area on earth, to get cylinders good enough for even a fairly crude early model of his engine.
(Rotary steam engines -- turbines -- are more efficient but also much harder to make than reciprocating ones with pistons. They have to operate at higher speeds and pressures and need good steals, ball and roller bearings, precision machining, etc.)
The Romans could have made stirrups, or horseshoes, or rudders, or fore-and-aft sails, or printing presses, if someone had explained the concepts to them; they had the materials and production capacity, they just didn't have the ideas. For steam engines they didn't have the tools to make the tools.
@ S.M Stirling: "The Terran Empire (and the Roidhunate) are both probably about as big as political units can get."
Do you base that on how long it would take a ship to get from Terra or Merseia to the Frontier? Based on what seems to make sense that the TE was about 400 pc (not ly) across, that would be about 6 1/2 weeks...If we don't have FTL (EXTREMELY likely that's the case) and we just have realistic mid-future technologies, then you could have a political unit inward from Saturn or Jupiter (http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/appmissiontable.php).
-kh
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