Talwin: estivators and hibernators; Merseian and Terran scientists.
Avalon: human and Ythrian colonists.
Dennitza: human colonists and Merseian immigrants.
Imhotep: human colonists and resettled Starkadian land- and sea-dwellers.
Daedalus: human colonists; a Donarrian settlement; a Cynthian inn-keeper.
More than I expected when I started this list.
"[Flandry's] Merseian companions walked spectral before and behind him, on their way up the narrow trail. Most of them he could not see, and the Domrath they followed were quite lost in the mists ahead."
-A Circus of Hells, CHAPTER FIFTEEN, p. 308.
On Talwin, hibernators, Merseians and one Terran cooperate. The inter-imperial conflict is light-years away. The universe, even the galaxy, even this part of one spiral arm of the galaxy, are very big places.
For different reasons, Dominic Flandry resembles Simon Templar, James Bond and Horatio Hornblower.
20 comments:
Up until comparatively recently -- 30-40,000 years ago -- there were multiple hominin species on Earth. Anatomically modern humans date back around 300,000 years; behaviorally modern ones about 80,000.
Our type of human can adapt culturally to virtually any environment habitable by something roughly like us; we don't need to do so genetically. In fact, many extreme environments weren't inhabited by hominins until we came along.
Kaor, Paul!
I have my doubts about Dominic Flandry having any strong resemblance to Horatio Hornblower. Flandry was a very individualistic aristocrat with sybaritic inclinations, while Hornblower was a professional naval officer with determinedly middle class views and tastes.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I tried to read Hornblower in chronological order but, at the time, Vol III or so was out of print and unavailable. The similarity is a naval officer who rises and rises from ensign to admiral.
Paul.
Paul: Flandry is a naval officer, but only because the Imperial Navy is effectively the only central military/security organization in the Terran Empire.
It doesn't have an Imperial Army, only the Marines.
And unlike Hornblower, Flandry doesn't get much in the way of 'conventional' naval experience -- serving on and commanding ships, for example.
In a contemporary setting, he'd be a CIA or MI6 operative.
There was a time - not that long ago - when professional naval or army officers were, in fact, intelligence agents, undercover operators, advisors to local forces, etc. The British and Russians in Central and Southwest Asia, the Americans and Japanese in the Western Pacific and eastern Asia, the French and British in Africa (and the French and British and Turks before that), etc.
Before the organization of the Secret Service during the Civil War, the US Army and US Navy - even before the creation of the Military Intelligence and Naval Intelligence specialties, functioned as intelligence collectors and special operators in theaters and operations that would make the OSS or CIA SAD raise an eyebrow - Eaton and O'Bannon and the Derna operation, for example.
There's always been spying and intelligence operations; what changed in the 19th century (surprisingly late in the century) was that these were formalized and embodied in permanent organizations.
Before then it had been mostly ad-hoc and often rather amateurish. In KIM, Kipling posits an omnipresent, large-scale Indian Secret Service; in fact, no such organization existed at that time and the closest was the Political Service, which wasn't very close.
Russia had the Okhrana, which was fairly close to the modern concept. The UK didn't until the early 1900's, when the Secret Service was regularized and equivalents of MI5 and MI6 were founded.
But as late as the four or five years just before the First World War, the -head- of the organization which developed into MI6 was wandering around Germany in a false mustache and glasses, trying to get info on German naval developments.
It looks like the only similarity to Hornblower is a series recounting step by step promotion from ensign to admiral but that's something.
Walsingham's organization may have been ad hoc, but so was the English military of the same era; but Walsingham's group was not amatuerish.
The thing is, even before the formalized military and naval intelligence services of the late 19th Century, there were professional, full-time organizations dedicated to gathering intelligence; they just tended to be called something else - usually with something akin to a scientific mission.
The Corps of Discovery, Topographical Engineers, and Coast Survey all had what amounted to an intelligence gathering mission in peacetime; the Coast Survey formed what amounted to a joint Army-Navy-Civilian intelligence and war plans organization in 1861, and performed very capably as such.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Actually, Flandry began his career in the Imperial Naval Flight Corps. And transferred to Naval Intelligence because of the events recorded in ENSIGN FLANDRY. And THE REBEL WORLDS recounts how he was due, as part of his training, to do a stint as a ship commander.
Yes, his work was mostly in Intelligence, but Flandry was also a real Navy officer.
Ad astra! Sean
We have a new histirical expert commenting on the blog.
historical
Dave: yeah, but these were all -temporary- incursions into the field.
That doesn't mean they weren't well done, amateurs can perform efficiently, but they didn't have institutional memories the way an organization -for- intelligence gathering did.
Something similar happened in the Roman Empire with the Frumentarii but went further; they started out as commissary agents organizing supplies, and gradually became an organization of spies and covert-ops types.
(And got a very bad rep; they were abolished and replaced by the agentes in rebus, who underwent a similar evolution.)
As I pointed out, the supposed -head- of the British Empire's foreign intelligence operation was sneaking around Germany in 1912 in a fake mustache; the US code-breaking operation was shut down in the 1920's because the Secretary of State thought that 'gentlemen shouldn't read each other's mail'.
The past is another country; they do things differently there. It's important not to 'project' the present onto the past.
Writers of historical fiction and of time travel sf really need to convey that: "...another country..."
And when the Boer War started, it turned out that the entire intelligence operation of the British Army, with its worldwide reach, consisted of -two- officers and a couple of clerks.
This was rapidly expanded to 132 officers and 2,321 enlisted men during the war, and then largely disbanded again after the war was over.
As I said, ad hoc, for a particular task.
Note that the greatly enlarged staff -during- the war would all have been amateurs who had to learn on the job... because nobody was doing the job before the war.
The British Army acquired a General Staff after the Boer War...
...and in 1914, most of the officers attached to the staff immediately went back to regimental service, went to France and mostly got killed.
Per Walsingham, yes, the British military in the Elizabethan period were -ad hoc-.
This worked fairly well for the navy, because the boundaries between trading, privateering, piracy and naval warfare were fairly porous. People could and did shift from one to the other all the time, and on both sides.
Spain's naval forces weren't any better organized, and the English had better ships, better cannon, and a more realistic informal doctrine for ship-to-ship engagements. The Spanish, who were understandably focused on the Mediterranean, never really caught up.
The British (or English) -land- forces were an ad hocius joke, though, despite thousands of English volunteers fighting the Spanish in the Low Countries.
If Parma's veteran tercios had ever gotten ashore, it would have been kitty bar the door and everyone knew it. The Armada had to be defeated at sea or it was game over for Elizabeth and England.
And if you want a study of shambolic chaos in action, take a look at the American 'mobilization' for the war with Spain at the end of the 1890's.
Christ, what a mess. Teddy Roosevelt actually hijacked the shipping to get the Rough Riders to Cuba, and when they got there nobody knew where they were supposed to land.
Paul - "Hysterical" is probably closer, but thank you. ;)
SM - The past is another country, but in some cases, there was more institutional memory and "on-going" focus than one might expect; in the U.S., for example, the Army's Topographical Engineers and the Coast Survey (which for the 19th Century, is a pretty impressive example of a "joint/purple" outfit; Army, Navy, Revenue Service, and "civilian") all had what amounted to an intelligence gathering mission in peacetime, and in wartime, the Coast Survey formed the Blockade Strategy Board (the afore-mentioned joint Army-Navy-Civilian intelligence and war plans organization) in 1861, and performed very capably as such.
The S-A war is an interesting case; mobilization in wartime or short of war is one thing, intelligence gathering and analysis and war planning is entirely another.
In terms of the later, the USN, thanks in large part to the NWC, was quite well-prepared when war broke out, all things considered; the Army, which did make efforts to take advantage of the knowledge of the Cuban and Filipino insurgents for intelligence purposes, did not manage the mobilization in an outstanding way, but against the Spanish in the Caribbean and the Pacific, did manage to assemble, transport, land, and sustain division-to-corps-sized expeditionary forces (of the day, of course) pretty effectively, all in all.
Major combat was over in about four months from M Day, and in both theaters (including trans-Pacific!), which - compared to the equivalent by peer powers in roughly the same era - is pretty impressive, actually. The failures of the British in South Africa in almost the same time period against a "Western" enemy are a pretty stark contrast, despite the "relative" importance of the British armed forces to the UK at the time vis a vis that of the US armed forces to the US.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Very interesting, esp. your comments about the Anglo/Spanish war. I did read that an important reason for the failure of the Armada was the death of the fleet commander, Admiral Santa Cruz, before it left port. That forced the overall commander, the Duke of Medina-Sedonia, to assume direct command. The problem being that he was not a navy man, his forte was diplomacy and politics. Apparently Santa Cruz and the Duke of Parma were supposed to take care of the naval/army aspects while Medina-Sedonia dealt with the politics of a Spanish conquest of England. If that was what Philip II had in mind the admiral's death upset all that.
Considering how much I dislike Elizabeth I, I would not have wept if she had been captured and whisked off to exile in Spain!
Ad astra! Sean
DS: Yes, the US did win the Spanish-American war, but that wasn't anything even remotely resembling fighting a peer opponent. Teddy Roosevelt and a number of others were utterly horrified at the thought of those methods being applied against someone not as shambolic as the Spaniards, who were a complete joke.
It was one of those circumstances when losing would have required making -all- the decisions wrong, simply because the scale of resources available to the two sides was so utterly disparate.
The US had a lot of capable junior officers, and the Navy did reasonably well, but the Army's higher-ups were overage, overweight and generally incompetent, and the tiny Regular army of the Indian Wars period was a fossil.
Hence the creation of a General Staff system after the war, and the other reforms pushed by Wood et. al.
Even so, when Wilson became President he threatened to shut down the GS when he found they'd been doing contingency plans for war with Germany. Even after it had been explained that contingency planning was what General Staffs were -for-.
I might add that precisely the same political suspicion of contingency planning prevented a British General Staff for a long time; and it was the chaotic bungling of the Boer War, Britain's (bigger and more expensive) 'lesson' equivalent to the Spanish-American war that finally forced them to accept reforms in the command structure.
There were individual exceptions, but in general 19th century military institutions just didn't work very well. Better than any non-Western country, but by later standards, they were inept and most particularly at the higher levels.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have read of how there were tensions and disputes between the US and UK in the late 19th century that might have led to war between them. Even if the military of both countries had many of the same problems (elderly, incompetent officers, aversion to contingency planning, chaotic organization, etc.) a war between them would have been nothing like the war fought with a declining power like Spain.
Ad astra! Sean
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