What better arrangement for an interstellar imperial planet than to have antipodal co-capitals?
Ardaig
ancient
the original Merseian capital
surrounding the bay where the River Oiss enters the Wilwidh Ocean
a megalopolis stretching east to the Hun foothills
traditional, ceremonious, leisurely
the planetary cultural and artistic centre
the location of the annual Grand Council
the site of Castle Afon, the Roidhun's main residence
also the location of the new Admiralty House, aircraft swarming around its upper flanges
close to Castle Dhanghodan, seat of the Vach Ynvory
Tridaig
young
technological
brawling
lively
occasionally violent
Brechdan Ironrede, fleet admiral, currently Hand of the Vach Ynvory and Protector of the Grand Council, had ordered that Admiralty House be built in Ardaig, not Tridaig, because:
"...he simply knew it was right that the instruments of Merseia's destiny should have roots in Merseia's eternal city." (p. 89)
There are powerful connotations in the phrase, "eternal city."
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
What we learn about Ardaig and Tridaig shows that the planet Merseia was well on its way to becoming a de facto planetary city. As had happened to Terra long before.
ANY historically aware person knows what "eternal city" means, and WHERE!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I don't think so. Merseia industrialized a lot faster than Terra, and more evenly, and got FTL and extrasolar colonization relatively earlier too. There are some big cities, but IIRC Flandry also sees lots of rural areas.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Once you pointed that out, I have to agree. Merseia first became aware of the REALITY of intelligent life on other worlds and FTL around its approximation of our late 1500's. That enabled Merseians to jump start industrialization and STL space travel more quickly and without the false starts and dead ends humans had to laboriously work their way thru.
Even without the Valenderay supernova and the other events recorded in "Day of Burning," Merseia would very likely have independently invented the FTL hyperdrive fairly soon.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: it's a shrewd extrapolation of the effects of a 'modernization' inspired/imposed from outside. With the concomitant feeld of redentment and burnong ambition to catch up and surpass.
The results are quite different from what the indigenous development would have been.
Like Stalin trying to catch up with and surpass the West?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
Mr. Stirling: Burning resentment? Yes, I remembering "Day of Burning" mentioning how a fierce, proud people had their noses rubbed in their own insignificance when that first Grand Survey discovered Merseia. Irrational, of course, but real people in real history have behaved liked that.
Paul: Not just Stalin. Lenin was big on grandiose projects as well. Ulyich was hot for electrification and dams!
Ad astra! Sean
Paul: I had Meiji Japan in mind.
The Japanese got a profound shock with Commodore Perry (and a few British punitive actions) when they realized that unlike the situation in the 1600s, when the Tokugawa decided to isolate Japan, Japan was now so weak that minor naval detachments could beat the stuffing out of them.
Sean: yes, the Bolsheviks were big on dams and so forth. They wanted the fruits of modernization; unfortunately, they had a weirdly incorrect set of ideas about how to achieve it.
The Japanese were more "humble"; they accepted that they'd have to copy (and adapt to their circumstances) large elements of the -system- that had produced Perry's frigates.
But then, Tokugawa Japan had an extremely sophisticated commercial system already functioning. It was basically already up to early-modern Western standards; all that was necessary was to strip off the fossilized feudal overlay and introduce Western education.
Hence the Bolsheviks went wrong was that they assumed they knew a lot more than they did.
Hence they ended up with Stalin's 'fake modernization' -- defined as a system under which steel is an end-product, and people are intermediate goods.
(By Breshnev's time, the local saying was "they pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work".
It's significant that after 1991, pretty well all the Soviet-era industry was found to be essentially worthless -- when priced at market levels, most of it was found to produce end-products worth -less- than the raw materials involved.
It's notable that the Russian Federation basically trades unprocessed raw materials for manufactured goods; even its domestic manufacturing is critically dependent on imported machinery.
One of the advantages -- which is also a disadvantage -- of 'catch-up' modernization is that you can just copy stuff.
If you have no roads, building roads works. But you run into 'diminishing returns' once you -have- roads; building more gets you less and less per unit of expenditure.
The Chinese have now run into this, along with a lot of other things (including pollution like you wouldn't believe). Their investments are giving lower and lower returns.
It's the "middle-income trap." Countries like Taiwan and South Korea got out of that by democratizing and marketizing their economies.
Mainland China can't, and the results are likely to be spectacularly bad.
Dictators and dictatorial regimes can -start- modernization.
In fact, initial modernization may need a degree of concentrated, centralized power to get going because it involves overriding established custom in ways that many people find profoundly upsetting and even objectively painful.
When the Industrial Revolution started, Britain had a representative government, but it was an oligarchic one with (still) strong aristocratic elements. Iro nically, this was what made it possible for it to preside over the uprooting of traditional society. The Whig grandees who ran it gave the industrial/commercial bourgeoise their heads because they stood to profit from it (and for a long time they did) and they suppressed lower-class objections because, well, that was what grandees did.
If the Chartists had gotten their demand for universal suffrage in the 1830's, modernization probably would have come to a screeching halt; if you examine their beliefs, the Chartists were Luddites, and hated the changes industrialism was imposing.
Sort of William Morris types, but while Morris "reactionary socialism" was just nostalgic fantasy by the 1880's, in the 1830's the process of development wasn't irreversible yet. Lewis was in that tradition.
But past a certain point, capitalism needs democracy to function well.
Chile is a case in point. In the 1960's, it was a typical middle-income trap pit of stagnation, threatening to tip over into some form of Castroism. Neither fish nor fowl nor good red meat, as the old saying goes.
(Vide contemporary Cuba for where that ends up -- in 1956 it was the richest country in the Caribbean, and nowadays it's only barely ahead of Haiti.)
Pinochet was a nasty piece of work and his regime was brutal, but it made Chile's current states -- part of the First World and reasonably stably democratic -- possible.
current status?
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for these fascinating comments! I recently finished reading the third, massive, volume of Solzhenitsyn's MARCH 17, and again I can tell how much better off the Russia of Nicholas II, despite its faults, was compared to the nightmare set up by Lenin and Stalin. Modernization of industry and agriculture was more and more a bottoms up affair, not something directed by the State. And a real democracy was starting to take root there, based on the Constitution of 1906. Another five or ten years of peace and Ilyich and Stalin could not possibly have seized power there.
Yes, Neiji Japan set itself modest, realistic goals, a big reason for the successes it achieved. Including importing some of the trappings of democracy. Even if the "genro" did not believe in democracy, the mere existence of those trappings set a precedence.
Yes, China has gone as far as it can with State directed "capitalism," including building useless roads and useless, empty cities. Even if the Maoist regime soon spectacularly fails, huge harm could still be done if China tries to violently take over Taiwan.
I do wonder what might have happened to Cuba if that thug Castro had not overthrown Batista. As dictators go the latter was nowhere as bad as the former.
Ad astra! Sean
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