"Lightning flashed, briefly hiding the sun. The boats rained molten down the mountain." (VII, p. 402)
"Lightning reached. David Falkayn heard the crack of torn air and gulped a rainy reek of ozone. His cheek stung from the near miss."
-Poul Anderson, "Lodestar" IN Anderson, David Falkayn: Star Trader (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 633-680 AT p. 633.
This is not natural lightning. Poul Anderson is describing combat, first on the Moon, then on an extra-solar planet, Tametha. (Tametha is mentioned in "The Master Key," then visited in "Lodestar.")
Space boats are rendered molten by beams from Muddlin' Through, piloted by Chee Lan, rescuing Adzel and Falkayn. The lightning that reaches for Falkayn is a near miss from a Tamethan gun. In Satan's World, rival companies resort to violence. In "Lodestar," exploited natives rebel. Something is rotten in the Polesotechnic League.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. Too many in the Polesotechnic League were losing the SELF RESTRAINT, the common agreement not to do certain things, etc., necessary to continue making the League successful.
Sean
Indeed. The failed Council of Hiawatha intended to reform the League members, but I don't recall what (if anything) was proposed. As we have seen in OTL over the past 150 years or so, corporate self-regulation doesn't work very well- theee needs to be "countervailing power" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countervailing_power) to keep markets free and fair.
Cheers,
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
Au contraire, if I recall correctly from MIRKHEIM, the Council of Hiawatha made concessions to the demands of GOVERNMENTS which were to eventually do its bit to undermine the Polesotechnic League. A huge, oppressively centralizing gov't is far more of a threat to a true free enterprise oriented society than any corporation.
Sean
Indeed. Wonder what those concessions were, and did it cause an immediate or long-term reduction in NI, ROI, market share. etc/ Also how long are corporations expected to last? They used to have limited charters. Meanwhile, here's an interesting article on the history of the corporation from 1600-2100. (https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2011/06/08/a-brief-history-of-the-corporation-1600-to-2100/)
One section on the East India Company makes it sound a LOT like SSL.
The author says (this is simialr to what I has the Tough SF author saying, NOT my own words):
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"A very rough sketch of how the EIC solved the equation reveals the structure of value-addition in the mercantilist world economy.
The EIC started out by buying textiles from Bengal and tea from China in exchange for gold and silver.
Then it realized it was playing the same sucker game that had trapped and helped bankrupt Rome.
Next, it figured out that it could take control of the opium industry in Bengal, trade opium for tea in China with a significant surplus, and use the money to buy the textiles it needed in Bengal. Guns would be needed.
As a bonus, along with its partners, it participated in yet another clever trade: textiles for slaves along the coast of Africa, who could be sold in America for gold and silver.
For this scheme to work, three foreground things and one background thing had to happen: the corporation had to effectively take over Bengal (and eventually all of India), Hong Kong (and eventually, all of China, indirectly) and England. Robert Clive achieved the first goal by 1757. An employee of the EIC, William Jardine, founded what is today Jardine Matheson, the spinoff corporation most associated with Hong Kong and the historic opium trade. It was, during in its early history, what we would call today a narco-terrorist corporation; the Taliban today are kindergarteners in that game by comparison. And while the corporation never actually took control of the British Crown, it came close several times, by financing the government during its many troubles.
The background development was simpler. England had to take over the oceans and ensure the safe operations of the EIC...."
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IF I understood you correctly, the League did this for themselves....
IMHO, why the Hanseatic League IN SPACE would be viable remains to be seen. (http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/03/interstellar-trade-is-possible.html, http://toughsf.blogspot.com/2017/04/interstellar-trade-is-possible-part-ii.html)
Going forward, would if be feasible to support opinions/statements with non-Andersonian sources?
Cheers,
-kh
Kaor, Keith!
Very interesting, what you said or quoted about the East India Company. I did know of how for a long time the Chinese insisted on being paid for their exports with silver, rather than other goods. And I have read of how an increasingly desperate EIC tried first, to persuade China to accept manufactured goods from the West as payment, up to and including modern weapons and better sea going ships. It was the Chinese gov't's short sighted refusal of such generous trading offers that led the EIC to turn to opium, only to discover that WAS one item the Chinese were willing to pay silver for. Which means hard money started flowing out of China.
By about 1840 the widespread abuse of opium so alarmed the Imperial gov't in Peking that it took steps to try curtailing the opium trade. Unfortunately for China, her policies of isolating herself from the outside word and neglect of the military meant China was not able to make any bans of opium STICK. Hence the opium wars.
Part of China's problem was sheer ignorance of the outside world, including how to conduct diplomacy with other nations. Given a reasonable amount of experience, a Chinese ambassador in London would have known not everybody in London was happy about the squalid opium trade and would have encouraged this distaste. Also, a wiser China would have known better how to curtail opium imports in ways that would not have offended British national pride.
Of course you can cite non-Andersonian sources. I've done so myself in some of my letters to Anderson and some of the essays I wrote for this blog.
Sean
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