A judge, Daniel Espina, has asked for a private interview with some self-confessed mutineers whom he must sentence. Like Guion, who interviews Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly in the same author's The Shield of Time, Espina seeks something more subtle than another bunch of data. He wants to know how something feels. His request to the mutineers leads into Chapter I of the novel.
Espina is a good guy trying to understand a difficult situation. He is comparable to Guion but contrasts sharply with various characters in Frank Herbert's Dune series who engage in personally nasty power conflicts at the top of their society. We do not know what it is like to live in that society. Espina lists some of the kinds of "mankind" in the World Federation:
a prosperous Japanese engineer;
a gang lord in the Welfare district of a North American city;
a Russian mystic;
a Dry African peasant.
We were introduced to a Welfare district at the beginning of The Star Fox and have come a long way since then.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
While nasty, those power struggles, at least in DUNE, were interesting. The things being fought over at least made sense and had a point. It sort of became pointless and meaningless in the sequels.
And we are all too aware of gang lords in the real world!
Ad astra! Sean
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