In Mirkheim, II, Grand Duchess Sandra is surprised when Nadi tells her that David Falkayn had been involved with the Supermetals company and she is surprised again when Nadi also mentions Nicholas van Rijn in this connection. If we have read "Lodestar," then we already know the full story. If we have not read "Lodestar" but have read Mirkheim consecutively to this point, then we should have been able to piece most of it together - but Sandra has not had our advantages.
The Prologue told us that Falkayn had discovered and named Mirkheim. Chapter I told us that van Rijn had forgiven Falkayn's betrayal of him regarding Mirkheim and also that Supermetals had concealed the trader team's discovery of the planet. For Sandra's benefit, Nadi summarizes the plot of "Lodestar." Indeed, later in the Technic History, that story will be published in The Earth Book Of Stormgate. Then at last anyone who is interested will have access to the full facts - at least anyone on Avalon.
In The Game Of Empire, Tachwyr wishes that Aycharaych were still alive to share a moment of victory. Consecutive readers of the Technic History know something that Tachwyr does not, namely that, even if Aycharacyh had somehow survived Flandry's bombardment of Chereion, then he, the last Chereionite, would no longer have any reason either to serve Merseia or to rejoice in its victories.
14 comments:
Here is a comment I made in a discussion about people in the present thinking they would have eg: opposed slavery even if they had been raised in the pre US Civil War south, or immediately realized Heliocentrism was true in the early 1600s.
___________________________________________________
It was only with Kepler’s elliptical orbits that a heliocentric model predicted planetary motions better than a geocentric model.
Galileo’s observation of Jupiter’s moons showed that there are at least some objects that definitely orbit something other than the earth. The phases of Venus are hard (impossible ?) to explain in a non-heliocentric model.
For a non-dogmatic thinker, it was really only the combination of all of those developments that would remove reasonable doubt about heliocentrism. Though the lack of observable parallax of stars bothered scientists until measurements became good enough to detect the parallax in the 19th century.
Similarly in the case of continental drift/plate tectonics. There was reasonable doubt until the 1960s. It was accumulated data better explained by plate tectonics that tipped earth scientists into general acceptance of plate tectonics.
Honest present day scientists can try to look at what evidence was available to their predecessors of a given time to judge what they might have believed under the circumstances.
How to apply similar considerations to ethical issues is another matter.
Kaor, Jim!
And that reminded me of how a big reason why Galileo got into so much trouble was from him mocking people who had honest, reasonable, scientific reasons for doubting heliocentric astronomy. That made him many needless enemies!
Ad astra! Sean
Well, ethics is not a matter of discovering what's accurate; it's a matter of taste, or fashion.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I can't go that far because I believe we can use reason and logic alone to work out systems of ethics. As Aristotle and his scholastic successors did. As did St. Paul in, I believe, the Letter to the Romans.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: you can reason -from- a moral premise, but you cannot reason -to- one. Attempts to do so always proceed from an unstated moral assumption.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, and I believe some moral premises, such as the wrongness of deliberate murder, can be logically defended.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: they can be -functionally- defended; ie., a belief that murder is 'wrong' is essential to an orderly society.
But -function- has nothing to do with right and wrong as such, it's merely instrumental.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that is where we will have to agree to disagree. Because I also believe in divine revelation backing up moral principles.
Ad astra! Sean
Do you have to reject any version of the Golden Rule to avoid concluding 'slavery is wrong'?
Perhaps if you deny that the entity you are enslaving is a person?
Kaor, Jim!
Of courses not! Slavery is a bad thing--and it has also been a universally practiced/perpetrated institution thru out all of the history of our Fallen race. What matters is how, because of Judaism and Christianity, ideas, customs, laws, etc., gradually whittled down and eroded what was once a matter of fact acceptance of slavery.
It helped enormously, of course, that changes and advances in economics and technology, beginning in the 18th century, made slavery more and more inefficient, wasteful, costly, and impractical.
Alas, we still have, de facto if not de jure. Sex slavery, for instance. And some Muslim countries are again practicing chattel slavery.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: in fact, the British first ended their slave trade, and then abolished slavery, when both were at or near the peak of their profitability. They did it for what were purely moral/ethical reasons.
Seymour Drescher's ECONOCIDE: BRITISH SLAVERY IN THE AGE OF ABOLITION gives detailed proof and is widely regarded as a classic.
In essence, British colonial slavery was expanding at unprecedented rates in the period 1791-1807, and when the British banned the slave trade they had active frontiers (in newly-acquired territory) and high demand in established areas (since slaves had a net negative reproduction rate).
Likewise, British Caribbean slavery was monstrously profitable in the early 1830's.
Abolitionists assumed that the slaves would become wage laborers and be even more profitable that way, but that didn't happen.
Just as the advocates of slavery had predicted, on most islands ex-slaves withdrew their labor from the plantations as much as they could, and sugar production went from very profitable into a long decline.
Jamaica is the best example, where sugar production pretty much collapsed between 1833 and 1850.
The only exceptions were places like Trinidad, where indentured laborers from India were brought in (that also happened in Indian Ocean colonies like Mauritius).
And in Barbados, where the island was small, all the land was in plantations so there was nowhere to go and squat and become subsistence peasants growing their own food, and the population was dense and dependent on imported grain.
There the ex-slaves kept working on the plantations, but only because they had no alternative.
In general, after the British abolished slavery, their Caribbean islands went from the main sources of sugar to impoverished economic backwaters, and sugar production moved to Cuba and Brazil.
Where it was based on chattel slavery until late in the 19th century.
Plantation agriculture, particularly the labor-intensive varieties, requires -reliable- labor.
That meant slavery, or indenture, or a crowded labor market where not working for wages meant starvation.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I sit corrected! I should have remembered men like William Wilberforce who opposed slavery for ethical reasons. And that, even in 1800, slavery remained profitable in certain parts of the world.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yup. Wilberforce and others (the Quakers started it) practiced an extremely individualistic form of Christianity, and if you do that, slavery becomes an obvious evil. Particularly if you're not -in- the slave society in question, and slavery had already been legally -un-recognized -in Britain- itself.
This was novel. Western Europe had been the first large area on Earth in which there was no slavery at all (by the 1200's) but that happened gradually and without much fuss. Same in Japan, where it was abolished in 1590 by the Shogun of the time; it had already become very rare.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that was good of them!
I can see why convinced Christians who happened to be Draka in your Domination books were regarded with hostility and suspicion. Their beliefs might slowly undermine the Draka form of slavery.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment