Grand Duchess Sandra and her son, Eric, discuss their response to the Baburite invasion.
"'We can organize guerillas.'
"'They'd spend near their whole time surviving.' At the present epoch, Hermes had a single continent, Greatland, so enormous that most of its interior was a desert of blazing summers and bitter winters. 'Worse, they'd invite reprisals on everybody else. And never could they defeat well-equipped troops on the ground, missile-throwing ships in orbit.'" (p. 153)
A conversation can be narrated without identifying a point of view. See the description of the dialogue between van Rijn and Hirharouk in Coya Conyon. I had to check but this conversation between Sandra and Eric is definitely narrated from her pov. Her cigar smoke tastes harsh.
However, of particular interest is the explanatory interpolation, beginning "At the present epoch..." A future historian, recounting the conversation, pauses to explain to his audience the geology of Hermes in that long past epoch.
For the development of Greatland by a later Grand Duke, see the link from "Hermes," also Edwin Cairncross's Ambitions.
2 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Our own Earth, in the remote past, once had a Greatland of its own, called either Pangaea or Gondwanaland. Until tectonic plate movements broke it and separated them into the continents we now have.
Happy New Year! Sean
Poul didn't like guerilla wars. (It's notable in ORION SHALL RISE).
There's a reason for that.
War is a contest in inflicting and enduring pain.
Guerillas have to be willing to see their -own land and people- burn and bleed without limit and without end; it's how they leverage superior determination against superior physical force, making themselves ungovernable short of genocide.
Which is why guerilla war works best against people with scruples; which gives those people a very strong incentive to shed scruples.
This is why the traditional Western law of war limits fighting to the uniformed representatives of States, with civilians enjoined to passively obey whoever's occupying their territory.
Like civil wars, guerilla wars tend to be competitions in atrocity, far more than "regular" wars between States, which are bad enough.
Hence a successful guerilla strategy requires a pellucid ruthlessness and indifference to pain, and Poul didn't like people like that.
Note that there were very few successful guerilla wars against the Roman Empire, because the Romans had a simple answer to that sort of thing: 'vastatio'. "To lay waste" -- ie., just kill (or sell as slaves) every single inhabitant and burn everything to the ground.
"They make a desert, and call it peace," as a Roman historian said of his own people.
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