War World, Vol. I: The Burning Eye (New York, 1988).
(This volume is an anthology so it has no single author. No one is credited as Editor. Instead, the title page informs us that the volume - or the series? - was created by Jerry Pournelle with editorial assistance from John F. Carr and Roland Green.)
Between the outer cover and the uncredited PROLOG (pp. 1-8), there are:
a page of blurb;
a blank page;
the title page;
publishing information;
the dedication to Jim Baen;
a two page map of the moon, Haven;
a Chronology;
the table of contents;
a blank page.
To summarize, the first five items in the Chronology cover:
1969 Armstrong on the Moon
1990 US and USSR create CoDominium, outlaw military research
2008 FTL drive tested, perfected
2010 habitable planets discovered, exploited
2020 interstellar colonization begins; Space Navy created
In James Blish's Cities In Flight, the West falls, the Bureaucratic State rules Earth.
In Pournelle's future history, the USSR unites with the US.
In our timeline, the Cold War bankrupted the USSR.
Was it in American political and military interests to exaggerate the strength of the USSR? Somewhere in Expanded Universe, Heinlein argued that this kind of exaggerating was going on.
3 comments:
The USSR exaggerated its own strength; the US was partly taken in by this -- though not as much as the Soviet Union's own leadership, because the structure of Soviet society encouraged systematic deception by superiors by each layer of authority.
There was good reason for this: eg., Stalin had his own census-takers shot just before WW2 for saying (accurately) that the population was declining, and when one official put in writing what everyone knew (that millions were starving during the mid-1930's) Stalin not only had him shot, but made him spend an entire day watching propaganda films of happy, prosperous collective farmers feasting and doing folk-dancing before his execution.
(This really happened.)
After Stalin's death, the punishments became less drastic but the practice of "shooting the messenger" bearing bad news continued; it's endemic to that sort of government.
By the 1980's, the Soviet top leadership was using pilfered CIA estimates as more accurate than the data it was getting from its own statistical bureaux... and the CIA's data was -still- too optimistic.
Putin has had terrible trouble getting accurate numbers on the prevalence of Covid-19 in Russia, because everyone's afraid of being punished for being the bearer of bad news.
The same thing happens in China.
One of the big tragedies of the 20th century was entire labor movements misled by Stalin and his successors and the amount of left-wing effort that went into supporting and defending brutal tyranny.
When I was a student in Dublin, a small group of Maoists did a very effective job of alienating very many people from any idea of socialism.
Kaor, Paul!
And the sooner nonsense like socialism is totally and absolutely discredited and people stop taking it seriously, the better for the whole world!
You cannot have socialism because any attempt to make it "work" requires precisely the brutal methods used by Lenin, Stalin, Mao, etc.
Ad astra! Sean
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