Tuesday, 16 May 2023

Conclusions And Beginnings

We recently considered "The Master Key" as in a sense a conclusion in that it is the last, and very comprehensive, Polesotechnic League instalment before the long drawn out decline of the League begins:

in Satan's World, the League is vulnerable to an external threat disguised as an internal information service;

in "A Little Knowledge," human merchants cause harm to others and thus also to themselves;

in "Lodestar," the conflicts are entirely internal to the League;

in Mirkheim, what looks like another external threat has been manufactured by one of the League cartels - leading to civil war and the effective end of the League.

We also considered "Starfog" as the last Technic History instalment. This future history series is full of beginning and endings which we need not enumerate again. Even this last instalment is a new beginning because immense wealth is about to be extracted from the newly discovered Cloud Universe.

New sources of wealth are a consistent theme! They take two forms:

new markets for Nicholas van Rijn;
new sources of heavy metals - Satan, Mirkheim, Wayland, the Cloud Universe.

1 comment:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

I don't think Satan was used primarily for mining, aside from finding needed resources. Rather, it was used more like a giant factory, manufacturing machines and parts for machines using methods that could not safely be used on living planets.

Ad astra! Sean