Bo Jonsson and Lundgard fight in the spaceship. This is the kind of sf that I read in comic strips in the 1950s. In the 1960s, I started to buy prose paperbacks addressed to adults but with spacemen and robots on their covers. I did not yet know whether adult concerns would work in spaceships.
Lundgard felt entitled to murder an innocent man, Johnny Malone, to further the cause of the Humanist Revolt. Are there people who think like this? Yes: terrorists. I attended a public meeting about the Birmingham Six. A speaker from the floor said, "Not only are the men who were convicted of planting this bomb innocent. Whoever planted the bomb was also innocent!" He argued that any act was justified for the cause of national liberation. Needless to say, the party that pushed this line did not gain mass support. But it existed for a while.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Unfortunately, there were times when people as bloodthirsty as this defender of terrorism did manage to seize power. Usually when an established regime was collapsing or losing its legitimacy, which is what happened to Tsarist Russia in 1917 or Weimar Germany in the early 1930's. And will, alas, happen again in the future.
Ad astra! Sean
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