Abrams to Flandry:
"'Sure, the Empire is sick. But she's ours. She's all we've got. Son, the height of irresponsibility is to spread your love and loyalty so thin that you haven't got enough left for the few beings and the few institutions which rate it from you.'" (CHAPTER FIVE, p. 49)
Sick? Sick? Then something needs to be done about that. The military can reply, "That's not my department." And, indeed, I would not advocate a military take-over which would not cure sociopolitical sickness in any case. But the purpose of this series is to show us Flandry's adventures off Earth, not social problems on Earth. But that there is something wrong with the Empire is part of the backdrop of the series. Flandry staves off the Long Night which will nevertheless fall if not during his lifetime, then afterwards. The Technic History also covers the post-Imperial period.
Chunderban Desai analyzes the problems in A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows and this should point the way towards a network of decentralized interstellar realms which do not all rise or fall together.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Sometimes I've thought some of the characters in these stories were too hard on the Empire. Compared to many actual, real world regimes, past and present, the Empire wasn't so bad, being, IMO, better than many of them.
I agree Terra had many problems in Flandry's lifetime, but he, and others like him did not give up and struggled to cope with those problems. If, because of their efforts the Empire survived for another two or three centuries, that counts as a success, to me.
Ad astra! Sean
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