"'What is de tale of de Dreamer?' asked Belgotai. 'You've mentioned some such.'
"There was silence, under the whistling wind, and men sat wrapped in their own cheerless thoughts." (p. 256)
Regular blog readers already know how often the wind punctuates the dialogue and even seems to comment in Poul Anderson's works.
In Anderson's Technic History, Aycharaych, who backs the Merseian Roidhunate, a rival interstellar empire, is the last of the Ancients. In "Flight to Forever," the Dreamer is the last of the Vro-Hi, the race that had counseled the Galactic Empire. Only they were intelligent enough to coordinate a civilization on such a scale. With only one member of their species left, there can never be another Empire on the pattern of the first. However, repetition would be wrong.
Saunders will see the beginning of the Second Empire but many ages after that.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
I certainly agree on the desirability of at least TRYING to learn from the mistakes of the past. Too often, alas, the same old mistakes gets repeated over and over.
Ad astra! Sean
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