(ii) Van Rijn and Sandra are on the terrace at Windy Rim:
"Above bulks of trees and hilltops reached a sky full of stars, Milky Way, glimmer of a nebula and of a sister galaxy." (p. 283)
For completeness, we should also note that van Rijn "...looked off into the Milky Way..." (p. 279) at the end of XX.
Sandra will remain Grand Duchess of Hermes and van Rijn will travel around in Muddlin' Through, trying to hold the divided Polesotechnic League together for a short while longer. After that, he might lead an expedition outside known space and she might join him.
Constitutional demands continue. Sandra thinks that Hermes will eventually become a republic and that this might be for the best. Benoni Strang, dying in Adzel's arms, said:
"'There will be other days.'" (XX, p. 276)
He was right. Social progress continues despite his attempt to hasten it by force. Anderson captures the dynamism and complexity of real historical changes in the twentieth century in fiction about a future century.
Immediate blog agenda:
finish discussing Mirkheim, XXI;
summarize and discuss the constitution of the Grand Duchy of Hermes;
pull back from the lives of van Rijn etc to view The Technic Civilization Saga, Volumes I-III as a future history. (There are also Volumes IV-VII but, for the time being, I-III suffice.)
Never the end - at least, not yet.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I have no use for Benoni Strang or other like him. Such as Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Pol Pot, Castro, et al. And social RETROGRESSION are as likely as "progress." What Strang did so disastrously was to destroy what was in many ways an admirable polity on Hermes.
Well, Hermes did not become a republic. It seems to have remained a grand duchy and later willingly became part of the Terran Empire as such.
Sean
Kaor, Paul!
My recollection is that Old Nick hoped some ghost of the Polesotechnic League would last longer than a short time, at least until some humorless Napoleon type finally ended the farce!
Sean
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