This post addresses the merits and limits of Chapter X.
Merits
Chapter X is a good contribution to a future history. In some American future history series, including this one, Poul Anderson's Technic History, many inhabited planets interact because of FTL travel. It follows that there are many planetary histories and one interstellar history, maybe eventually one galactic history although that is still far in the future at the end of the Technic History.
Chapter X describes part of the history of Diomedes. There is political conflict while the Admiral of the Fleet dies. The viewpoint character, Rodonis, prays, reflects on her and her arrested husband's respective social statuses and blackmails the Admiral's heir to release her husband.
Limits
Although Rodonis is a Diomedean who flies to the Fleet flagship, she could have been a human being flying with a gravbelt. Her prayers, thoughts and dialogue do not differentiate her as an ET. Poul Anderson does emphasize biological and psychological differences between intelligent species and this had happened in the preceding chapter:
"'...most of the young die -'
"'They are replaceable,' said Trolwen, with a degree of casualness that showed he was, after all, not just a man winged and tailed." (IX, p. 199)
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And the irony being that Theeonax really was innocent of having anything to do with his father's death!
I don't think it's that improbable to think Rodonis would be concerned about her husband Delp, think pragmatically about their social and political statuses, or pray to her God, etc.
And before modern medical and better hygiene became widespread in the West and those parts of the world influenced by the West, many parents had to expect a high childhood mortality rate. Some might have even been "casual" about that.
Ad astra! Sean
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