The Rebel Worlds shows us Chives's home planet, Shalmu, features Hugh McCormac's doomed attempt to reform the Empire, describes the metropolis in its own right of Admiralty Center in the Rocky Mountains, reveals Flandry's imagining of the coming Long Night and informs us of his tragic relationship with Kathryn McCormac and the fulfillment of the curse put on him by the heroine of the previous novel. Flandry exiles McCormac and his followers. Their remote descendants will be discovered millennia later in the concluding installment of the Technic History when human civilizations have spread through several spiral arms of the galaxy, Anglic has become a dead language, Vixenite colonials have colonized New Vixen and the planet Serieve has also been colonized on the galactic rim.
Rereading The Rebel Worlds could lead to rereading other Flandry stories and also that concluding installment, "Starfog."
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Alas, I'm a slow reader, so I'm still wending my way thru Julian May's MAGNIFICAT. But I like that idea of rereading the Flandry stories. They are among my favorites in Anderson's works.
I remember David Birr suggesting Admiralty Center had its remote origins in the US Cheyenne Mountain NORAD base, which was then taken over by the Navy of the Solar Commonwealth after the US joined it, with the Empire later vastly expanding it and the complex becoming that city in its own right we see Flandry brooding over.
I don't think all of the McCormac rebels who fled into exile because of Flandry eventually ended up settling Kirkasant. We see mention in "Starfog" of only one star ship bringing the ancestors of the Kirkasanters to that planet. I can imagine one or more ships, for any number of reasons,breaking away from the McCormac flotilla.
I know publishers often insisted on short novels at the time Anderson was writing THE REBEL WORLDS, which constrained how much he could write into the story, but it's a pity we don't see more about Emperor Georgios and his unnamed widow, the Empress Dowager. I speculated in another combox that the Empress Dowager actually conferred with Vice Admiral Kheraskov on the dangerous problem posed by Aaron Snelund.
Ad aatra! Sean
I think the "curse" laid on Flandry is more of an accurate analysis of his own personality and its probable outcome.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that makes more sense to me than Djana somehow "hexing" Flandry. I simply can't really see such a "wishing" by her affecting someone as strong willed as Flandry was over so many years.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment