So what did happen during the Long Night? Before beginning his narrative, our far future narrator imagines Roan Tom's ghost answering that question. With only a little rewriting, this passage could have been based either in a literal hereafter or in the inter-cosmic Old Phoenix Inn, which has had at least one visitor from the Technic History.
Interstellar society has fallen;
a long fall is a hard one;
spaceships are no longer built;
there is little interplanetary trade;
therefore, there is "trouble" on most planets;
after one or two centuries, there are many small, short-lived nations covering only a single planet, continent or even island;
there is no longer any interstellar information collation;
the few remaining working spaceships are highly prized;
they are acquired by the toughest men who use them to conquer or plunder;
Tom's Lochlannian father, outlawed after a feud, turned pirate;
Tom, born on a spaceship, grew up fighting and, when a landing party that he was in was ambushed, was sold into slavery;
he gained power on Kraken and tried to restart trade;
fleeing from Sassania with two wives in a damaged ship needing repairs, he evaded pursuit in a Nebula and emerged into space that had been at the fringe of the former Terran Empire but was now completely unknown;
now the story can start.
(Sassania was where Persis d'Io brought up her son by Dominic Flandry.)
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And some of the consequences of that HARD fall of civilization was loss of the knowledge and means needed for cloning and replacing lost organs and limbs. I recall Roan Tom hoping that somewhere, at some time, he would be able to replace an eye he had lost.
Ad astra! Sean
See, this is where I have hard time understanding how such a thing as loosing the ability to build hyperdrive ships could come to pass. Humanity have been building FTL starships for more than a thousand years - and to judge from the technic stories, they are not vastly improved in Flandry's era compared to what they were in Van Rijn's times, or for that matter, during the Great Survey.
Hyperdrive starships is an extremely mature technology by the end of the Imperial era. There is no way this technology would be lost, especially not since there are many working ships still in use to be reverse-engineered. Neither can it be result, except locally, of loosing access to needed raw materials. The first FTL ships were built with the resources of the Solar System.
What is easily believable is that industries would have been shattered, trade routes gutted, systems isolated etc. Long Night starships would perhaps be crude, compared to those of better times. But it defies belief that it would be impossible to build any at all.
Kaor, Johan!
But, in the chaos of the fall of the Empire, I can imagine the KNOWLEDGE, both theoretical and engineering, needed for building new FTL space could be lost on many worlds. Also, not every planet would have NEEDED to have ship building capabilities of its own. Or COULD have had advanced ship yards. Nike, for example, was an agricultural planet which was very poor in metals. That alone would have largely isolated Nike from the outside galaxy once the Empire fell. And that would have been true of many planets, both human and non human.
But I can imagine some planets, such as Sassania, which preserved a good deal of scientific knowledge, being able to build some crude FTL ships if it ever got a respite from political turmoil and outside attacks. That might have resulted from an alliance of Sassania, Nike, and Kraken, as suggested by Paul.
Ad astra! Sean
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