Vikings and Darthans alike raid in long ships. Darthan spaceships are lean with thin noses and fins because they must regularly pass through atmospheres to attack planetary surfaces. The rebel leader, McCormac, has hired Darthan mercenaries. He will not let them loot or settle but his basic offence is to let them in. They probably do not understand Anglic when Flandry transmits a peace message. His ship and its Darthan attacker destroy each other.
Selling spaceships and nuclear weapons to barbarians started in the League period. See "A Little Knowledge." This is one connection between these two historical periods.
"The barbarians in their long ships waiting at the edge of the Galaxy..."
-Back cover blurb on Poul Anderson, The Rebel Worlds (London, 1973).
That blurb more accurately reflects the interstellar situation in one period of the mini-future history of Anderson's "Flight to Forever":
"The barbarians along the Galactic periphery and out in the Magellanic Clouds..."
-Poul Anderson, "Flight to Forever" IN Anderson, Past Times (New York, 1984), pp. 207-288 AT CHAPTER THREE, p. 242.
Since we have discussed Catawrayannis, see Catawrayannis Base.
13 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I also thought of this bit from the revised version of "Warriors from Nowhere" (AGENT OF THE TERRAN EMPIRE, Gregg Press [1979], p. 43): " 'Barbarians'--Beyond this Taurian sector of the Empire lay the wild stars, ungarrisoned, virtually unexplored; and among them prowled creatures who had gotten spaceships and nuclear weapons too soon. Raids and punitive expeditions had often gone back and forth across the marches."
Ad astra! Sean
Which is an interesting contrast/comparison with human history; sure, in the Age of Sail and before, societies on the periphery of various imperia were able to absorb what technology and organization they needed to become peer competitors (at least locally); "gunpowder" empires (various incarnations of the Ottomans, Persians, Indians, etc.) were a thing, of course.
But in an era of steel and steam, the "aspirants" did not have much luck. Even post-Meiji Japan, which managed the most extensive technical and societal conversion, was utterly crushed in its attempt to challenge the "Imperium" of the day.
Which doesn't bode well for the space-faring Barbarians. ;)
Not sure
Kaor, Dave!
And I still disagree. I think you are dismissing too easily the harm barbarians could do if they gained enough advanced technology to go plundering, raiding, and attacking, where possible, civilized powers. I think Anderson, in "A Little Knowledge" and the revised version of "Tiger by the Tail" does a good job of speculating how barbarians with spaceships could be possible.
Ad astra! Sean
"Barbarians" can do a lot of harm to civilization with small arms, rental trucks full of fertilizer, or hijacked airliners, and it would take very little to "file off the serial numbers" of such realities for the purposes of speculative fiction; but the sort of "Viking raider" type of incursions that Anderson and so many other speculative fiction writers play with?
Not really. Certainly not in terms of the technological era of human history.
Kaor, Dave!
I am not so optimistic. But I agree the only way people will find out, either way, will be if FTL is possible.
And I would still bet on the more pessimistic scenario being the one that turns out to be true.
Ad astra! Sean
DS: the situations aren't comparable.
The Terran Empire doesn't have instant communications and can't fly people from star to star in hours -- it takes weeks at least, and so do communications.
Also, the barbarians in the Technic history can -hide- effectively. There's an equivalent of 'trackless wilderness' out there.
They don't have to camouflage themselves as ordinary people the way terrorists do; they can hit and run -before the authorities can respond-.
It's like Earth before steamships and telegraphs. And nobody really succeeded in suppressing piracy (and raiding) before technology shrank the world.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
You made points I should have thought of! And, e.g., it was only in 1830, as Charles X of France was conquering Algiers, that north African Moorish piracy was finally suppressed.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yes, it required the extension of both European power and European rules of international conflict to finally put paid to piracy on a substantial scale.
SM - Age of sail vs age of steam, however, and "maritime barbarians" were no longer a thing. And even in the era of steam-propelled gunboat diplomacy, there wasn't anything approximating "instant" communications until the wireless era ... at which point, "imperial policing" - as practiced by Air Commodore Richard Charles Montagu Pink, CBE - depended as much on aircraft, as gunboats. Just ask the peoples of the NW Frontier. ;)
So, actually, the situations are pretty comparable.
Kaor, Dave!
Disagree. You are still not addressing the points Anderson made in the stories I cited or Stirling's comments on why the situation faced by the Terran Empire were not comparable to what the US and the European powers faced in the age of steam and telegraphy.
Ad astra! Sean
DS: no, they're not comparable because of the -time- factor.
Interstellar movement and communications in the Technic history are inherently slow and limited.
The interstellar environment cannot be made comparable to the Age of Steam. It's just too big.
Nor are the interstellar spaceships depicted comparable to steamships; for the simple reason that they don't have to base their movements on fuel stockpiles.
They're powered by direct-conversion fusion reactors; which means, effectively, infinite range... rather like a sailing ship. From the descriptions they seem to be low-maintenance, too.
So they're more comparable to the Age of Sail in those respects.
They can keep going indefinitely, and their environment permits 'hiding' effectively.
Also, note that the initial phase of Western expansion did -not- depend on technological superiority.
The East India Company conquered India from the 1760's through the 1840's with the same weapons the locals had.
Similarly, the Ottomans started regularly losing wars with Europeans in the same 18th-century period.
The Enfield rifle-musket (the proximate cause of the Indian Mutiny) was, ironically, the first weapon that couldn't be made by the local artisans.
The East India Company's naval operations in the same period used wooden sailing ships, of types which had (in gradually improving form) been present in the Indian Ocean since Europeans first circumnavigated Africa.
The "Company Raj's" advantages were organizational and conceptual, not a matter of material technology in military terms.
Eg., the Sikh arsenal at Lucknow in the 1840's produced weapons nearly identical to the ones the East India company's troops bore, except that they had more heavy artillery than the Company did. In fact they were mostly -copies-, and fully functional ones, of Company weapons.
What made them such a formidable opponent was the fact that their troops had been trained by European mercenaries, which was Ranjiit Singh's brainstorm and a highly successful one. He was smart enough to stay on the Company's good side, though.
What enabled the Company to beat the Sikhs, despite quite comparable weaponry and even strictly military organization and tactics, was that the Sikh -state- was backward in its -organizational- technology, ideology and so forth.
The Sikhs had a 'modernized' army but its form of State was purely post-Mughal Indian, a patrimonial despotism. Paying its troops was a matter of foraging, for example; authorized looting of its own subject population.
Likewise, the French conquered Algeria in the 1830's and 40's with the same tech the locals had, basically; black powder, muzzle-loaders, cavalry using cold steel.
Again, their advantages were in terms of State organization, financing, and in strictly military terms military organization, discipline, tactical methods, etc.
A little further east, Egypt under Mehemet Ali again used Western mercenaries and teachers in the educational institutions he set up to modernize his armed forces in the post-Napoleonic periode; in his case he partially modernized his administrative structures and finances too.
As a result, Egypt's troops beat the Ottomans like a drum, were successful (unlike the Ottoman army) against the Greek rebels,subdued the Wahabi movement in central Arabia, and conquered the Sudan.
Note however that when they tried to fight -European- forces, they were the ones who got beaten. It was Europeans who stopped Mehemet Ali's attempts to conquer Constantinople.
As late as Tel-el-Kebir in 1882, the British army that fought Urabi's forces was identically armed -- Remington single-shot breechloaders against Martini-Henrys, Krupp artillery against Armstrongs.
Yet the result was not seriously in doubt for a moment.
And in the Sudan, during the first war with the Mahdists, the rebels beat -Egyptian- armies, sometimes commanded by British mercenaries (like Hicks Pasha), but they never won a fight with -British- troops who were comparably equipped. Some of the fights were close-run and involved substantial British casualties, but the Brits won all the encounters.
Western military tech in the strict sense didn't start really drawing ahead until the 1850-1880 period, with single-shot breechloaders, early mechanical machine guns, rifled and breechloading artillery and so forth.
It didn't become completely dominant until smokeless powder, magazine rifles, and Maxims.
Note, however, that non-Western armies that re-equipped with fully modern weapons in that period still mostly lost -- Adowa in Ethiopia being a prominent exception, but a rather lonely one.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Fascinating, esp. how Mehmet Ali apparently had ambitions to overthrow the Ottomans and take over their empire! I can see why the European powers stopped him: any downfall of the Ottomans like that would have thrown the Balkans and the Near East into chaos. Everything would have been up for grabs!
Ad astra! Sean
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