"Nearly every major political wave after space flight had its vestige somewhere in the inhabited part of the galaxy."
-James Blish, Earthman, Come Home IN Blish, Cities In Flight (London, 1981), pp. 235-465 AT CHAPTER ONE, p. 249 -
- like the colony planets in Poul Anderson's Technic History trying to preserve distinctive cultures and ways of life.
An Okie explains:
"'Traveling away from Earth for us is very like traveling in time: different distances from the home planet have different year-dates. Stars remote from Earth, like yours, are historical backwaters. And the situation becomes complicated when the historical periods interpenetrate, as your Hamiltonian era and the Hruntan Empire have interpenetrated. The two cultures freeze each other the moment they come in conflict, and when history catches up with them - well, naturally it's a shock.'"
-op. cit., p. 252.
Thus, Hamiltonian republicans and Hruntan imperialists wage war while an Okie city wants to trade with either and the Earth cops want to incorporate both.
My next blog task is to relate this point to Anderson's Technic History but there are some domestic and spiritual tasks to complete first.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And we still have a multitude of different political and social forms on Earth alone right now. Ranging from constitutional regimes of various kinds which believes in some degree of restraint being placed on the state to lingering remnants of tribes still close to a Stone Age level.
And if we are going to imagine such things on an interstellar level, I think Anderson (and to a somewhat lesser degree Pournelle) convincingly shows us a similar variety and diversity of social/political forms better than did Blish. Probably because Anderson and Pournelle had more TIME for working out the implications of their speculations.
Ad astra! Sean
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