Tom thinks that Yasmin will:
"...bear him good sons." (p. 462)
She has a classical education which turns out to be of practical assistance because, that far in the future, "classics" includes, we learn, not Homer but astrophysics. She is also skillful at persuading young men to come back with her to help win the war on Sassania. With Yasmin's help, Tom starts to build some interstellar alliances which might explain one of the legends about him, that he was:
"...a hero, a gallant and romantic leader of fresh young peoples destined to sweep out of time the remnants of a failed civilization and build something better." (p. 457)
Something much better is eventually built. If the later interstellar civilizations came out of what Flandry, looking forward, had called the Long Night, then representatives of those civilizations, looking backward, would have called it something else. Maybe the Terran Empire was a galactic False Dawn?
2 comments:
To be blunt, I find the 'future civilizations' Poul (briefly) describes far less credible than the Terran Empire, at least without massive genetic engineering.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have to agree, if you mean "Starfog." I did not think the Commonalty entirely convincing. Except that story was set early in its history, when the Commonalty was not yet faced with any existential crises.
Ad astra! Sean
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