"A Tragedy of Errors."
"In the hush and dreamlike liberty of weightlessness, Tom found an inner peace; and from this he turned outward, becoming one with the grandeur around him." (p. 460)
Inner peace and oneness: meditation.
Tom's spaceship, the Firedrake, has a black camouflage coating but, in some places, energy beams have cut through the coating to the steel and reflections off this are painful to the eye. They would be but I would not have thought of that.
Old Earth is two hundred light-years away. Thus, Tom is on the fringe of the former Imperial sphere. References to the Terran Empire, Kraken and Sassania tie this story firmly to earlier installments of Poul Anderson's Technic History.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
WAY back in the late 1980's, I was delighted to find out Gregg Press was reprinting many of the stories of Poul Anderson in good, high quality hard cover editions. So, I purchased the entire collection of seven volumes called THE WORLDS OF POUL ANDERSON.
Alas, Volume VII, TWO WORLDS did not contain THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS, even tho it should have! Instead, this volume collected QUESTION AND ANSWER and WORLD WITHOUT STARS. I wish THE WAR OF TWO WORLDS had been included, then it would have been THREE WORLDS.
That mention of Terra, Old Earth, some 200 light years away from Nike, made me wonder what might have been happening even further away, 400 light years, in the diametrically opposite marches of the fallen Empire? Could a remnant of the Empire analogous to the Eastern Roman Empire have been holding out somewhere? And what was going on on Old Terra itself? Mysteries and questions abounds!
Ad astra! Sean
Correction, I meant to say "WAY back in the late 1970's..."
Sean
Paul, Sean,
I too would have loved to hear something about the state of Old Terra. What is mystifying about the fall of the Terran Empire is that on Earth, (almost) no Empire actually fell without being conquered, with the possible exception of the Mayan civilisation. Without a military collapse of some sort, no matter how decrepit a civilization has become it will tend to linger untill killed. We see this holds true even in the Technic Era in THE STAR PLUNDERER where the Commonwealth, reduced to complete impotence, still nominally rules a Terra many times plundered by barbarians.
So while barbarians might have overwhelmed the Imperial Fleets and plundred the Imperial worlds at will, I would expect the worlds themselves, unlessed nuked to inhabitability or barbarism, to remain under control of some planetary authority. To be sure, once Imperial protection vaned, other planets would cease to pay homage and taxes to Terra. But on Terra herself, the Empire itself would likely continue at least in name, as a purely planetary government, much as it did in the last decades of the Roman Empire. And again, unless nuked to ruins, Terra herself has such resources and population to be able to continue civilization and re-establish security at least locally.
Kaor, Johan!
Your comments and questions make sense! And, in fact, I would expect something roughly to what happened to the Western Roman Empire to be what happened to the Terran Empire. That is, barbarians and human warlord would take over smaller or larger of the Empire, at least at first. And the last century or the Empire on Old Terra might have been marked by increasingly impotent Emperors who were the puppets of their "guards" or Mayors of the Palace.
But, yes, at least for a time, some remnant of the Empire should have lingered for a while on Old Terra and the Solar System. With enough strength preserve some kind of order. But, remember as well Roan Tom's "hypothetical" comments at the beginning of "A Tragedy of Errors," once the collapse started it would worsen as time passed, on many worlds, until they all hit bottom "almighty hard." It would have been vastly worse than what happened to the territories of the Roman Empire--because of civilization and technology having risen so much higher!
Ad astra! Sean
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