Friday 25 December 2020

Christmas Under A Red Dwarf Star

"The Season of Forgiveness" is the sixth of twelve works collected in Poul Anderson's The Earth Book Of Stormgate and the eighth of eleven works collected in Baen Books' omnibus volume, The Technic Civilization Saga, Volume I. It is a sequel to the first story about David Falkayn and the second story about the Ivanhoans who later join Falkayn's Supermetals Company.

A pagan can either acknowledge Christ as another god or convert to the belief that he is the one god. In Anderson's Technic History, the Wodenite Axor converts to Christianity whereas the Ivanhoans recognize that Christ is the Prince of Peace of the Terran traders who therefore should have special wisdom to negotiate peace during his season.

Meanwhile, I am considering how Avalon, a mixed human-Ythrian colony, should conduct its affairs both internally and externally, but this is probably too complicated an issue for Christmas day when we take a rest from practical politics.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Except, perhaps, conceptually, I never thought of "The Season of Forgiveness" as a sequel to David Falkayn's adventures in "The Three-Cornered Wheel." By which I mean both were set on Ivanhoe and touched on religious ideas. The first shows Ivanhoans who were monotheists and the second others (on a different continent) who were pagans.

Altho it is only implicitly hinted at, I can't help but wonder if the people of the ancient, half ruined city of Dahia and their nomadic neighbors of the Black Tents became so interested in Christianity that many of them converted to that faith.

Btw, the Pleiades cluster of stars, where Ivanhoe is located, is 400 light years or more from Sol! That has to make "The Season of Forgiveness" one of the most reemote of the Technic stories.

As for Avalone, I seriously doubt we can improve on what we see in THE PEOPLE OF THE WIND, both among Ythrians and humans. Bu I do have some doubts on how well the extreme libertarianism of the human settlers would do handling the chaos of the Long Night.

Merry Christmas! Sean