In Genesis, PART TWO, V, 2, Laurinda tells Christian that:
the servants are underpaid, underfed, under-respected and servile;
American colonists keep slaves and will rebel;
the parasitical French monarchy will provoke a terrible revolution to be followed by twenty five years of war.
Anderson summarizes these conditions but clearly could have novelized them without having to involve the Time Patrol or post-organic intelligences. Obviously, I appreciate sf but some passages in Anderson's works make us wish that he had written more just about historical periods.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Meaning you would have liked Anderson to have written more historical novels a la THE GOLDEN SLAVE, ROGUE SWORD, THE LAST VIKING, etc.? I can see it would have been very interesting if he had done one or two such books set in the 18th century.
Btw, I think, after reading Alexis de Tocqueville's THE OLD REGIME AND THE FRENCH REVOLUTION, that Anderson was too dismissive of the old French monarchy. And I do agree it had many strains and stresses that could and did lead to revolution. But France did not HAVE to undergo the horrors of the Revolution and/or a military dictatorship. Any number of things could have changed that would probably have led to a better outcome.
Ad astra! Sean
The French Revolution illustrates how lucky the American rebels were -- most revolutions make things massively worse. The Terror, the genocidal slaughters at home (the Revolutionaries killed off over a third of the population of the Vendee, for starters), and a generation of massacre and war and tyranny that left burnt villages and bones in ditches and starvation and deathless hate all the way from Cadiz to Moscow. Even further afield, in fact!
Of course, the American Revolution had the advantage of being led by the people who actually ran the American colonies before 1776 anyway. They were experienced in government and its necessities, and they weren't utopians.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly! What made the American "Revolution" so unique was that it did not become like what almost all revolutions become: tyranny, massacre, civil wars and wars, etc. I have read of how, even now, the hatred left by the Revolution in western France (the Vendee, etc.) lingers on.
I have absolutely no use for Utopians and dreamers and their impossible fantasies about perfect and ideal solutions! All we ever get from them are monsters like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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