A disabled spaceship floats in the Jovian atmosphere like an eighteenth-century French balloon.
A Trader in the Stellar Union period is compared to a Viking during the First Dark Age and a Martian war lord in the Second Dark Age.
Interstellar voortrekkers are compared to frontier scouts and mountain men.
Olaf Stapledon's Last And First Men is a future history. His Last Men In London is a Last Men reassessment of past history.
HG Wells wrote An Outline of History and The Shape of Things to Come. The latter, published in 1933, begins with analysis of contemporary society before moving into the future.
Future histories by Anderson, Blish and Niven present some information about past galactic history.
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I thought the word "voortrekkers" originally referred to entire communities of Boers migrating away from territories ruled by the British in southern Africa? Which was possible because Shaka Zulu's genocidal "crushing" of rival tribes opened up new lands the Boers could move into.
We see a lot about the ferocious King Shaka in H. Rider Haggard's novel NADA THE LILY.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I don't know about the origin of "voortrekker." Anderson applies it to an individual.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I know, but was not sure of the original meaning of the word. I did know many Boers resented British rule and migrated from the old Cape Colony for that reason.
Ad astra! Sean
In Afrikaans, it meant both individuals and groups depending on whether it's singular or plural; it translates as "pioneer", pretty much.
Literally, it means "before-traveler"; ie., those who go first.
Sean: they'd been trekking for a long time, sometimes to get away from irritating rules by the Dutch East India Company's government, and always to get more land.
They had huge families and every son expected his own 6000 acre ranch at least. You can use a -lot- of land that way!
The Great Trek was more or less a magnified and more politicized version of what had been going on since the 1690's.
Note that while the British did things that annoyed the Boers, the main problem was that the Dutch regime had barely even tried to control anything beyond Cape Town and the intensive farming districts immediately around it.
In the "Overberg", the areas "over the mountains", it just reigned lightly and didn't try to rule. The frontier settlers effectively ran things by themselves, with impromptu institutions like the "commando", the local landowners in arms. Cape Town supplied Dutch Reformed ministers and ammunition.
The British government expected to actually -run- the country; they installed a court system, and tried to prevent raiding and counter-raiding, and promoted a new degree of monetization and trade.
This, as much as specific policies, was the basic source of friction.
Imagine French bureaucrats trying to run the areas in Old Kentucky settled by Daniel Boone and his compatriots and you'll get an idea.
NB: in the brief interlude when the puppet "Batavian Republic" ran the Cape (after the first British occupation and then withdrawal in the opening stages of the Napoleonic Wars), the new Dutch regime did try to actually run the place.
It caused much friction and, IIRC, at least one armed revolt among the frontier settlers.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating comments about the Boers! Something similar might have arisen in the western territories of the US, if the Federal gov't had not been so quick about setting up permanent political and judicial structures.
Ad astra! Sean
The difficulty of getting past the Canadian shield to the prairies pre-railroad, mostly prevented something similar in Canada. However, one might see some parallels between the Riel Rebellions & the Boer War.
Sean: frontier institutions in the US were very decentralized and often extremely rough-and-ready.
Read Teddy Roosevelt's account of his time as a rancher in the Dakota Badlands in the 1880's, during the open-range period.
He once tracked down some bandits who'd stolen his property, and marched them overland to the nearest sheriff (who was nearly 100 miles away).
The sheriff took custody of them but said "Why in Hell didn't you just -shoot- them?"
They wrote to him from prison thanking him for his trouble. Most other ranchers in the area -would- have just shot them if they'd caught them.
They were a lot like frontier barons, complete with blood-feuds.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, but my point was that such semi-anarchical conditions did not LAST long, certainly not for generations and centuries.
It was decent of TR not to kill those bandits out of hand!
Ad astra! Sean
TR was a stickler for proper legal procedures... when he could be. Not averse to a fight when he considered it necessary, though!
NB: TR always said -- probably perfectly sincerely -- that he actively enjoyed the charge up San Juan Heights.
During which he personally pistoled two Spanish soldiers with a gun salvaged from the battleship "Maine" in Havana harbor, btw.
He also said that he didn't expect to survive it when he started; which, considering the casualties (around 20%), the fact that he was the only man on a horse, and how close he came to some Spanish bullets (one of which knocked his glasses off), was a perfectly sound calculation of the odds.
TR was apparently terrifying in a serious fight, utterly fearless and cool-headed, operating to 10-10ths capacity, quick-acting but thinking all the time.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
TR was a truly formidable and dangerous man! And in many ways a very admirable man. But I continue to dislike and disagree with many of the policies we see him following in your BLACK CHAMBER books. President Taft and the conservative wing of the Republicans were right to basically right to throw the election of 1912 to that bungler Woodrow Wilson. President
Wilson shared many of TR's ideas but was far less able a man. So anti-TR Republicans figured he would at least do less harm.
No one could have predicted in 1912 what a catastrophe Wilson would be in WW I and its consequences!
Ad astra! Sean
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