"'You're so pale,' the woman said. 'Would you care for drink?'
"'Christ, yes!' [Lockridge] meant no blasphemy: not of that god." (p. 152)
He has seen the savagery of the Wardens' reign. They debase their pantheism by hunting and burning human beings.
Suddenly a novel with an exotic futuristic setting addresses basic social issues.
See:
There are too many people to serve the purposes of bureaucrats or aristocrats but not too many people to serves the purposes of people themselves! - who should be ends, not means. But we have discussed this issue in two previous posts.
Serious sf always returns to fundamental questions.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Being what we, all humans are, I absolutely expect some societies to be far more bad than not. Such as the human sacrifices and cannibalism of the Aztecs. Or the abominable religion of the Peacock Angel in Stirling's THE PESHAWAR LANCERS.
Ad astra! Sean
When the Aztecs dedicated their seventh temple to "Hummingbird of the Left Hand", they sacrificed 5,000 slaves in three days on the four altars -- one every fifty seconds or so. Then they threw the bodies down the sides; the lake the city (later Mexico City) stood in turned brown and stank. Oh, and they -ate- parts of the bodies.
You really can't overestimate the dead-ends some societies get into.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
One way for the Aztecs to dispose of all those corpses would be to eat them. (Snorts)
Also, I recall reading in Prescott's HISTORY OF THE CONQUEST OF MEXICO of how, when some Aztecs ate the corpses of Spanish soldiers, they complained of how Spanish meat tasted bad!
Anderson did not shy away from examining some grim, even dystopian ideas in some of his stories, where we see some of those dead ends alluded by you. Examples being "The High Ones," "The Pugilist," "Welcome," "Eutopia," "The Martyr," "Murphy's Hall," with "In Memoriam" seeming a natural sequel to "Murphy's."
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: I suspect the Spanish tasted bad because they were meat-eaters...
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Ha! Cue in lions eating other lions, with them growling to each other: "This tastes bad."
Ad astra! Sean
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