At the end of Ian Fleming's Casino Royale, James Bond, who has had some serious questions and doubts, has become determined to stay in the 00 Section, to which he had recently been promoted, and to go after SMERSH.
CS Lewis' The Magician's Nephew, the prequel to his The Lion, The Witch And The Wardrobe, recounts the creation of Narnia and the beginning of travel between worlds and explains why Narnians have human kings and queens and speak English.
James Blish's Cities In Flight, Volume I, They Shall Have Stars, describes the two scientific discoveries that make flying cities possible although no cities fly until Volume II, A Life For The Stars.
At the end of Poul Anderson's "Time Patrol," Manse Everard, a new recruit to the Time Patrol, has been promoted to Unattached status which he will retain throughout the series.
At the end of Part One of Anderson's The Star Fox, the new interstellar privateers leave the Solar System.
At the end of part one of Anderson's Orbit Unlimited, it has been agreed that an ideological group that does not fit in on Earth will colonize the extra-solar planet, Rustum. In part two, they are en route but might turn back. In part three, they are in orbit around Rustum and transferring to the surface. Finally, in part four, a new generation grows up on Rustum. And there is a second volume as well as another story set on yet another extra-solar planet.
All good stuff. Read them all.
14 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Of all the Narnia books I've read only THE LION, THE WITCH, AND THE WARDROBE. I'm sure it's my loss, but the Narnia series never "grabbed" me. Probably because I only read THE LION after reaching adulthood. I should give the others a chance.
I read most of the Bond books and the ones I enjoyed most were the ones featuring the Soviet SMERSH as Bond's opponents. I've thought SPECTRE an unsatisfactory replacement for SMERSH as the villains Bond combated.
In "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" we see Manse as the senior officer sent to warn Carl that he was making dangerous mistakes and had to take agonizing corrective actions. I've wondered if Manse was on the very edge of being promoted then to the Middle Hierarchy of the Patrol.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I read Lewis' popular theology in young adulthood and therefore also read his adult and juvenile fiction, not making much distinction between adult and juvenile, as with Heinlein etc. Lewis' THE HORSE AND HIS BOY is a bit Heinleinian.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
So I should give his other Narnia books a chance.
Ad astra! Sean
The whole series is much better than just that first written volume.
Sean: I agree with Paul. I think he wrote the first book on impulse, but thought and crafted the others with increasing care.
IIRC, at the end of the "New America" books, another bunch of ideological misfits from earth -- very different from the originals! -- is being sent. Sort of exotic Hindus, IIRC.
The New America stories in part reflect the experience of settling British North America from the early 1600's on.
All of New England was founded by religious dissidents. So (with a different set!) was Pennsylvania, and so was Maryland (by Catholics).
Georgia welcomed religious dissidents, as well as debtors and others.
That's the basic reason that by 1776 Anglicans were a minority in the American colonies.
They'd been prominent in settling the areas from Virginia south, but after the 1710's a mass influx of Scots-Irish (Presbyterians, mainly) and Germans surged south from Pennsylvania down the Appalachian valleys and into the Piedmont of the southern colonies.
A book called PLANET NARNIA argues that there are seven and only seven Chronicles of Narnia because Lewis designed each volume to correspond to one of the seven "planets" (moving heavenly bodies) of medieval astronomy/astrology:
Sun
Moon
Mercury
Venus
Mars
Jupiter
Saturn
The book is based on a Ph.D. thesis and presents so much evidence that I think that the author proves his case.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Both: You make good arguments for me believing all the Narnia books are worth reading. I should not be too put off by thinking THE LION made the whole series seem too "young" for me.
Mr. Stirling: IIRC, the malcontents booted out by the World Federation were a kind of "neo-Confucians," people believing in a more austere philosophy than the founding libertarians of Rustum.
Your comments about how disparate the original settlers of the English colonies were had me realizing they began as people mostly at odds, one way or another, with the Crown and the Anglican church. That probably contributed to why the war of independence started in 1775.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: quite probably, tho' the gross bungling of George III's governments played a substantial role.
Frankly, the American colonies -were- free-riding on British expenditures; the colonies had started the Seven Years War/French and Indian war(*), then refused to pay any substantial share of it. The British had to pay colonial troops themselves. Englishmen had a lower per-capita income than the colonials but paid something like twenty or thirty times the taxes.
So trying to make them contribute to paying off the war debt wasn't -wrong-, but it was very -ill-advised-.
Even so, nearly a hundred thousand Loyalist refugees fled the US after 1782 out of a population of 2.5 million; and they weren't all the Loyalists, just the most stubborn ones.
The attempt to stop westward expansion of the colonial frontier was even more ill-advised.
If there was one thing nearly everyone in the colonies agreed on, it was pushing the Indians out and taking their land. Plus speculators in frontier land included many of the wealthiest, and hence most influential, colonial elites. Washington and the Ohio Company, for example.
(*) a certain militia Colonel named Washington at Fort Necessity, for example...
Harry Turtledove did an AH novel (in collaboration with Richard Dreyfus, oddly enough) called THE TWO GEORGES.
In that AH, the colonies and Britain composed their differences (symbolized by a portrait of George III and George Washington shaking hands), and the whole of North America was a giant Canada, a self-governing Dominion.
Some of it was a little more idealized than I'd have done it in that scenario, but it was amusing and I think basically on-target. Much better world than the one we got.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, the incompetence of the British gov't in the 1760's/1770's did a lot to needlessly provoke the war of independence.
I do sympathize with the view the colonists were not paying their fair share of the costs of defeating France. But the means chosen for insisting on that were ill-advised.
Ditto, what you said about the unappeaseable land hunger of the colonists and the fact powerful colonials speculating in land claims.
I did read THE TWO GEORGES, and it does touch on some dark spots in that scenario, such as a still resentful, embittered Ireland and how conditions in Appalachian coal mines needed drastic reforming. But, in many ways, a much better world than what we have now.
Ad astra! Sean
Something that helped to anger the colonists in what became the US was the return of Louisbourg to the French after the War of the Austrian Succession, the war *previous* to the French & Indian War (aka 7 Years War).
"The Fortress was besieged in 1745 by a New England force backed by a Royal Navy squadron. The New England attackers succeeded when the fortress capitulated on June 16, 1745....In 1748, the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle, which ended the War of the Austrian Succession, restored Louisbourg to France in return for territory gained in the Austrian Netherlands and the British trading post at Madras in India." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fortress_of_Louisbourg
In 1758 Louisbourg was captured by the British as a prelude to capturing Quebec and the rest of New France.
So from the POV of the colonists the British government had thrown away their achievement of the first capture of Louisbourg, and a lot of the expense of the later war wouldn't have been needed if the fortress had been kept. (I'm not going to actually argue for that POV)
Kaor, Jim!
You do raise some interesting points re Louisbourg. But I'm sure many in the Home Country would argue it was the British taxpayers who had to pay most of those costs, not the colonists.
Ad astra! Sean
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