-Poul Anderson, A Circus of Hells IN Anderson, Young Flandry (Riverdale, NY, January 2010), pp. 193-365 AT CHAPTER TWO, p. 204.
"...this twilight of empire."
- ibid., p. 209.
Evocative phrases.
As empire declines, so does loyalty to it:
"'...I've been working for Merseia. Not bought, nothing like that, I thought the future was theirs, should be theirs, not this walking corpse of an Empire - Merciful angels, can't you see their way's the hope of humankind too? -'"
-Poul Anderson, A Knight of Ghosts and Shadows IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight of Terra (Riverdale, NY, March 2012), pp. 339-606 AT XVIII, p. 568.
"Why should Kraken pay tribute to an Imperium which enriched toadies, fettered commerce, and neglected defenses? The law of the Roidhun was strict but just. Under him, men could again be men. United, the two civilizations would linger no more in this handful of stars on the fringe of the galaxy; they would fare forth to possess the cosmos.
"Erik Magnusson was converted."
-Poul Anderson, The Game of Empire IN Anderson, Flandry's Legacy (Riverdale, NY, June 2012), pp. 189-453 AT CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE, p. 435.
"Erik Magnusson, space captain and trader of Kraken, foreswore in his heart all allegiance to the Empire that had broken faith with him."
- ibid., p. 434.
Does the argument begin to sound convincing? Under the Merseian Roidhunate, the two civilizations would not be united. Terra would be subordinated. And the cosmos would be possessed by conquest.
"James Railton did not think of himself as a traitor. It was his country that had betrayed him. The old country had become a nonentity. The empire was in twilight time and the saviours had approached him just as his disillusioned view of country, family, God, and honour was at its lowest ebb."
-John Gardner, The Secret Families (London, 1989), Twenty-Five, pp. 372-373.
Saviours? From "Moscow Centre..." (ibid., p. 373) Cold Wars make a lot of people think that there are only two alternatives.
My blog posts slow down toward the end of a month, like today, and tomorrow will involve a coach trip to the nearby city of Manchester. Other current rereading: The Mystery of Consciousness by John Searle. We have referred to Searle when discussing the Artificial Intelligence question raised in sf works like Poul Anderson's Harvest of Stars and Genesis. I think that the nature of consciousness is the central question of philosophy and the most important question about humanity. It is implicit in all fiction, which is about its characters' perceptions and thought processes.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Ah, but we also see mention, even in A CIRCUS OF HELLS, of Merseian agents needing to take precautions lest their actions be detected by Imperial loyalists who would inform the authorities.
Conquest by Merseia, if that had been all, might have been eventually accepted as tolerable. What would make Merseian rule intolerable was its ideology of racial supremacism, the belief Merseians were superior to everybody else. And that included the Roidhunate being willing to exterminate entire intelligent species if they were too stubbornly resistant to Merseia.
Ad astra! Sean
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