"When did it go bad? Did it succumb to the vices of its very virtues?"
-Mirkheim, II, pp. 53-54.
"'It's fantastically complex, and the problem is getting worse. It's a case of transportation outstripping communication. We've got to bring all the components of our civilization together. You need only recall what happened on Earth back around the Second Dark Ages. Nowadays it could happen between whole stellar systems!'...
"'Sure... That's what the Union was organized to prevent. That's what Cordy work consists of.'
"'...we can't coordinate as many planets as are included in our civilization-range today. And that range is still expanding.'
"'[The Nomads]'re the worst disruptive factor our civilization has... They go everywhere and do anything, with no thought of the consequences. To Earth, the Nomads are romantic wanderers; to me, they're a pain.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Peregrine (New York, 1979), CHAPTER IV, pp. 29-30.,
In the Polesotechnic League period of the Technic History:
no interstellar government;
the unrestrained League.
In the Stellar Union period of the Psychotechnic History:
an interstellar government, the Union, and its enforcement arm, the Coordination Service;
the unrestrained (except by the Cordies) Nomads.
Which system is better?
See the comment by Anonymous in the combox here.
9 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I far prefer the Polesotechnic League, before it went bad, to what we see with the meddlesome, rather smugly irritating Co-ordination Service!
Ad astra! Sean
Anderson's politics in the 1960s and 1970s seem to have been all over the map (the Galaxy Vietnam War petition, for example), but the idea of "not" looting irreplaceable treasures, rather than doing so, just because one could, seems rather more "civilized" (as in Flandry's oft-mentioned "civilization loyalist" position) than the plans of the super capitalist antagonist in The Pirate.
The obvious point that actions have consequences is foundational to the back story of the "filed-off" ERE-Sassanian conflict of Terra-Merseia that frames all the Flandry stories, after all.
The Commonalty Rangers in Starfog (1967) seems to reflect similar dynamics as the Coordination Service, which reads like a mix of Interpol and the USCG; and Anderson - just like Heinlein, at one point - seems to have managed a novel or two where the crisis du jour was defused by some fairly adroit professional diplomats/civil servants, rather than whose battlefleet was more numerous.
Interesting, that.
Anonymous:
Thanks for your comments.
Could you please attach a name (or pseudonym) to them so we don't at some time start getting 2 anonymous commentators to confuse matters?
Okay. ;)
Thank you.
You are entirely welcome.
As one of H. Beam Piper's characters said, diplomacy operates on credit... and sooner or later, you have to pay off in cash on the battlefield, or you go bankrupt and go broke.
And yet, even Piper came up with protagonists who "won" their conflict with tools other than brute force.
Kaor, Dave!
But the real world is not like that. Those who win wars were the ones willing to accept the costs of achieving victory.
Even that murderous bungler, Putin, might win his war with Ukraine by sheerly ruthless determination a la Stalin.
Ad astra! Sean
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