Again, background details help the narrative: Ensign Helen Kittredge from Vixen and trained at the Foundry joins Magnusson's rebellion and the battleship on which she serves follows his flagship into Sector Aldebaran. The narrator imagines her as having leave on Ansa. The new information in this chapter includes the disclosures that a dim red dwarf will henceforth be known as Battle Sun and that the battleship with Helen Kittredge as an energy weapons controller takes a lethal hit in that battle. The character is introduced only to be killed but also to dramatize the human face of war.
The italicized items, including Helen's surname, have all appeared before, the Foundry earlier in this novel which explains why its name had seemed familiar on a previous reading!
The Kittredges join the Falkayns and Holms as families with more than one generation in the Technic History.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I also recall there were officers, having an "archaic" view of the oaths they had given to Emperor Gerhart, refusing to join Magnusson's revolt. It was right of them to do that.
The illustration you chose here is the least obnoxious of the covers I've seen for THE GAME OF EMPIRE.
Ad astra! Sean
The Roman Empire (the model for the Terran Empire) had a crucial lack of dynastic legitimacy. That was a medieval invention and acted as a constraint on civil wars.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree that lack of a strong sense of dynastic legitimacy, some kind of clear law of succession everyone felt bound to respect, was a serious weakness for the Roman Empire. Even in medieval Europe that idea of dynastic legitimacy needed some tweaking, like discarding the old idea that all sons of the king, youngest as well as the eldest, bastards as well as those born of a queen, had an equal claim to succeed their father.
Ad astra! Sean
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