In Robert Heinlein's Future History, there are of necessity clandestine revolutionary organizations during the Prophetic theocracy and Freemasons play a leading role in the successful Cabal. See also The Conspiracy. The only other secret organization is the Howard Families and all that they conceal is their longevity.
When Anderson's Time Patrol guards a million years of history, they do not find that they are thereby guarding a history-controlling Order or Brotherhood!
"How To Be Ethnic In One Easy Lesson," like "'It's Great To Be Back!'" in Heinlein's Future History, is an exemplary example of a short story about domestic life in a future period without any reference to world-controlling historical forces.
4 comments:
Secret conspiratorial organizations exist... but almost always as an "answer" to -imaginary- secret conspiratorial organizations.
They rarely amount to much; if they achieve power, it's by historical accident.
Eg., the Bolsheviks would pretty well certainly have been nothing but a historical footnote except for WW1, and the Russian government's catastrophic incompetence and bad decision-making during it.
(Though if there -hadn't- been a WW1, I would expect the revisionist wing of the Social Democratic parties to become more influential.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, and mercifully, most real conspiratorial organizations seldom amount to much. One of the rare exceptions, alas, were the Black Hand plotters of Serbia. Their successful, if outrageously COINCIDENTAL assassination of Archduke Francis Ferdinand in 1914 triggered WW I and all its baleful consequences. One of them being that obscure fanatic Lenin finally getting a chance at grabbing power in Russia in 1917.
By "...revisionist wing of the Social Democratic parties..." in Russia do you mean the sectarian Mensheviks? I can imagine, if there had been no WW I, these persons resigning themselves to accepting the Tsarist semi-constitutional monarchy and seeking power legally thru elections to the Duma and making the usual kinds of agreements and compromises with other parties of the kind seen in other countries.
Solzhenitsyn's awe inspiring book AUGUST 1914 gives us a massively detailed look at Tsarist Russia, showing us historical and fictional from all ranks of society, from Nicholas II himself down to the humblest persons. And showing us their fears, anxieties, hopes. One problem he detailed was of how the Russian army was saddled with too many elderly, incompetent generals who should have been put out to pasture years before. True, a few more years of peace and most of them would have been replaced by younger, far more competent officers.
I still can't help but think there would have been a much better world if there had been no Sarajevo. No World Wars, No Lenin, Stalin, Hitler, et al. True, that means WE OURSELVES would not have existed!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I had Germany in mind for the Social Democrats. Russia was... weird. Though becoming less so, gradually, until 1914 intervened.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Understood! You reminded me of Edward Crankshaw's book, THE SHADOW OF THE WINTER PALACE, a study of Russia from 1825 to 1914. Over and over the author puzzled over how peculiar Russia was. Including how the Tsars themselves, with scarcely a drop of Russian blood in them, were all TOO Russian.
Still, given another five years of peace, the Constitution of 1906 and the Stolypin reforms might have so transformed Russia for the better that it would have been impossible for the monstrous Lenin and his cronies to seize power.
Ad astra! Sean
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