Sunday 13 June 2021

Faustina, Raor And Other Villains

Minor characters (can) have hidden depths. In the space of a single short story, "The Pirate," Faustina is promoted from the supporting role of villain's mistress to the central role of spokesperson for the younger generation who do not understand the Pact. Brought up in "...scarring poverty...," (p. 140) what else can Faustina want to do except to get rich? We (should) wind up feeling sorry for her.

Another promoted minor character is Raor in the Time Patrol series. Introduced as a spear carrier in The Year Of The Ransom, Raor becomes a major villainness in The Shield Of Time and we do not wind up feeling sorry for her. These two characters present a major contrast.

We have previously discussed fictional villains in works by Ian Fleming, Stieg Larsson, SM Stirling and Poul Anderson. Every time a new villain appears in Anderson's Time Patrol series, the idea has been developed further:

an individual time criminal, Stane;
a collective villain, the Neldorians;
a more sophisticated collective villain, the Exaltationists;
an individual Exaltationist, Merau Varagan;
Varagan's anima/clone-mate, Raor;
temporal chaos acting through a personal causal nexus...

...and that is the summit of the series. The Exaltationists could be related to something larger, not a larger organization or conspiracy but the coherence of chaos. The meaning of the Patrol is to stabilize time. And what might have emerged if Anderson had written more?

3 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I never thought of Faustina, from "The Pirate," as being a villainess. More as someone to be pitied. She was certainly NOWHERE as monstrous as Stirling's female villains: Gwen Ingolfsson and Adrienne Breze!

I don't know how much more Anderson could have done with the Time Patrol. If time travel was possible on Earth, then it should have sometimes been discovered by non humans on other planets. How could anything be stable if time was being changed over and over millions of times (!) by other races? Are we to assume analogs of the Danellians existed on those other worlds, and that they too founded their own Time Patrols?

Once you start extrapolating the implications, it gets more and more complicated, and probably unsustainable. I think alternate universe stories of the kind Stirling specialized in raises far fewer such difficulties.

Ad astra! Sean

S.M. Stirling said...

Faustian’ name is rather significant...

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I noticed that too, but understood it differently. "Faustina" was the name of both Emperor Marcus Aurelius' wife and her mother.

Ad astra! Sean