Some Parallels

"Delta v" is a concept relevant to subliminal space travel but it crops up several times in Poul Anderson's "Inconstant Star" and I now have a layman's understanding of its meaning. See Comments here.

Poul Anderson describes "...popping in and out of hyperspace..." as "...transition between relativistic and quantum modes..." (Man-Kzin Wars III, p. 265) but this makes Known Space hyperspace sound like Technic History hyperspace. The latter is original: not another space but a succession of instantaneous quantum jumps within relativistic space.

In Anderson's Technic History, a Merseian says that "'...the highest end...'" is:

"'...absolute freedom for our race, to make of the galaxy what they will.'" (Young Flandry, p. 27)

- and tells his latest grandcub:

"'You shall have stars for toys...'" (p. 28)

One of Larry Niven's kzinti, written by Anderson, bares fangs at the stars and tells them:

"...we shall do with you what we will." (Man-Kzin Wars III, p. 261)

Merseians and kzinti are comparable to SM Stirling's Draka who say, "Glory to the Race!" but do not mean by this the entire human race and in fact succeed in making themselves a distinct species.

Echoes

When, in Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's "The Asteroid Queen," a kzinti Conservor of the Ancestral Past recites the Law, the astute reader might hear echoes of:

Merseian religion -

"As the God is Sire to the Patriarch..."
-Larry Niven, Ed., Man-Kzin Wars III (New York, 1990), p. 57.

Merseian social organization -

"...the officer is the hand of the Sire." (ibid.)

and Ythrian religion -

"...the Patriarch bares stomach to the fangs of the God..." (ibid.)

Also, a reference to "'...feral humans in the mountains...'" (p. 58) might remind us that the Draka describe free human beings as feral serfs.

My point of course is not that one work merely imitates the others but that all of these works are worthy of our attention. Kzinti are not just Merseians with feline features instead of green skins. Ythrian psychology and social organization reflect alien biology and physiology. And the Draka are what human beings might become! Read them all. 

Organized Crime

The Polesotechnic League protects Merseia from the effects of a nearby supernova. Merseia is not yet politically united so the League deals with the Merseians' only international organization, the Gethfennu, organized crime. Thus, humanity earns the enduring enmity of the Merseian aristocratic party.

Flandry enriches a vice boss on Irumclaw but only so that the vice boss will then pressurize the Empire to continue defending that Imperial frontier - against the Merseians.

In Jerry Pournelle's and SM Stirling's "The Children's Hour," the Yakuza, Japanese organized crime, still operate in the Solar System and have also moved to the Alpha Centaurian colony where they will help UN agents against the kzinti occupation without charge. Kzinti estates are squeezing out human society. Yakuza can try to deal with either but are safer with the latter.

I think that the Mafia is a survival of feudal social relationships (tradition, protection, violence, personal loyalty, religious observance) into capitalist society. A survival and an adaptation: organized criminals want either to transfer into legitimate businesses or to continue to prey on legitimate society. Either way, they need to protect that society against any invader (Nazi, Draka, kzin) that would really try to change the rules of the game.

Parallel Histories

Future histories were not written to be read in parallel but can be. Larry Niven's kzinti are, under different aspects, comparable to:

Wells' Martians;

Anderson's Merseians, Ythrians and Imperial Terrans;

Stirling's Draka.

Slavery in different forms is common to these six cultures. Kzinti and Ythrians are intelligent carnivorous hunters, motivated by blood odors in their warships. Kzinti enslave human beings and eat some whereas the Martians would have enslaved human beings and drained the blood from some. Kzinti and Draka plan to spend generations taming enslaved populations. Merseians and kzinti are aggressive interstellar imperialists.

We can imagine a narrative in which these timelines are discussed in the Old Phoenix and another in which characters in a quantum ship jump between timelines trying to influence the outcomes of space battles described in the various future histories.

Subordination

We see human beings subordinated to:

Martians in The War Of The Worlds;

extrasolar aliens in Martian-like machines in John Christopher's Tripods Trilogy;

Borthudians in the van Rijn period of Poul Anderson's Technic History;

green Merseians in the Flandry period of the Technic History;

feline kzinti in Larry Niven's Know Space History;

green Treens in Dan Dare;

Daleks in Doctor Who;

fellow human beings who make themselves biologically superior in SM Stirling's Draka History.

(That is another of those lists that grew in the writing.)

I was reminded of Draka and serfs when reading about a kzin and his human secretary. Like a Draka, the kzin promises to attend the secretary's offspring's naming-day celebration.

Subordination can be one way to survival. In a novel by Fred and Geoffrey Hoyle, workers asked what they thought about the prospect of an alien invasion, said that, under the aliens, they would still have to work. In one of Aesop's fable, a donkey carrying a heavy burden is advised to run away from an invading army but, when told that they are unlikely to make him carry anything heavier because he is already at his limit, says that he will stay where he is.

Having said all that, slavery is definitely worse than paid work and should be resisted at all costs!

Alternative Pasts, Presents And Futures

Whereas a future history becomes an alternative history as it recedes into the past, an alternative history becomes a future history if it is extended into the future. Thus, SM Stirling's Protracted Struggle between the Alliance for Democracy and the Domination of the Draka parallels the various UN/US-USSR/Cold War/World War III scenarios that we listed recently. In Stirling's The Stone Dogs, as in James Blish's They Shall Have Stars, Earth becomes a dictatorship but a few political refugees escape from the Solar System.

In fact, various other discontented groups also leave the Solar System in:

Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children;
the Breakup period of Poul Anderson's Technic History;
Anderson's Rustum History, The Boat Of A Million Years and Harvest Of Stars;
the Great Exodus period of Jerry Pournelle's CoDominium History.

Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers is an alternative history novel set in 2025 but does not feature space travel because, like Anderson's Maurai History, it recounts recovery from a global disaster.

The Ransom Trilogy, CS Lewis' reply to Wells' and Stapledon's future histories, also addresses the history of the future. Issues concerning the future of mankind on Earth are resolved in Volume III. In Volume II, the future is prophesied. Ten thousand years hence, Maleldil, Malacandra, Tor-Oyarsa-Perelendri and many hnau and eldila will descend, destroy the Moon and liberate Thulcandra (Earth) from its present hidden rulers -

- and you cannot get any more alternative than that.

Possible Histories

Alternative histories are logical possibilities. This means no more than that such histories can be imagined and contemplated without self-contradiction. Let us consider the cliched example of a German victory in World War II. A narrative describing a German victory is counter-factual in that it contradicts known history. However, such an account is not internally inconsistent or self-contradictory. This is all that is meant by logical possibility.

However, the proposition that alternative histories are logically possible might still have two different meanings. It might mean either that:

(i) Hitler could have won World War II;

or that:

(ii) there could be a parallel universe in which Hitler did win World War II.

(i) and (ii) are not the same proposition. A novel could be based on premise (i). If challenged on the counter-factual status of his narrative, the author might reply not that his novel is set in a parallel universe - this would be premise (ii) - but simply that all fictional narratives describe events that did not happen in any case.

A short story or novel that is set entirely within an alternative history might be an example of:

(i) this did not happen or
(ii) this did happen in another universe -

- except that the "did happen" in (ii) is fictional in any case.

Poul Anderson's "The House of Sorrows" could be (i) or (ii). However, much alternative history fiction describes (highly improbable) travel between universes and therefore is premise (ii). SM Stirling's Draka series definitely becomes premise (ii) only in Volume IV.

Omnipresent Conservatives

SM Stirling, Conquistador (New York, 2004).

British politics historically were Conservative or Liberal but then became, mainly, Conservative or Labor;

US politics, beneath or behind the Party system, are conservative or liberal;

Larry Niven's Pierrson's Puppeteers' politics are Conservative or Experimentalist;

Draka politics are Conservative or Militant;

New Virginian politics are Conservative or Imperialist.

Conservatives are ubiquitous. However, on reflection, it makes sense that, in any society, opinions are divided between a conservative faction and an alternative. Ancient China had conformist Confucians and anarchic Taoists with imported Buddhism maybe providing a synthesis.

In New Virginia, Conservatives, the Rolfes and their allies, believe in minimal footprint FirstSide and limited expansion Other Side whereas Imperialists, the Collettas and the Batyushkovs, want to conquer Other Side and enslave all the natives. The Bats might also retain ambitions in FirstSide Russia.

Imperialists sound like Draka. Suddenly it is important that they do not control the Gate.

A Consistently Good Themed Anthology

SM Stirling, Ed., Drakas! (Riverdale, NY, 2000) has to be one of the best sf themed anthologies. It is consistently good. How often can that be said?

Of the twelve stories, the last four involve cross-time travel. In two of these, the Draka are defeated or outwitted. In "The Peacable Kingdom" by Severna Park, rebel servus allied with Samothracians prevent the drakensis from conquering another parallel Earth, although this story maybe raises more questions than it answers.

I am reading "The Big Lie" by Jane Lindskold. The narrator denigrates Eric von Shrakenberg but is he merely expressing Draka prejudice? I might have a better idea when I have finished reading.

This is definitely the last post for January. We will meet back here next month, maybe tomorrow.

Merseians, Draka And Others

I compared SM Stirling's Draka to Poul Anderson's Merseians here. This had implications for Sean M Brooks' article, "Was The Domination Inspired By Merseia?" so Sean added a few new paragraphs. See here.

More generally, colonization and colonialism are issues common not only to Anderson's Terran Empire and Merseian Roidhunate but also to Stirling's:

Angrezi Raj;
Commonwealth of New Virginia;
Domination of the Draka;
"Lords of Creation" Solar System;
Nantucket;
Emberverse.

New Virginians include former white South Africans with racist attitudes comparable to those of the Draka. However, the Commonwealth is preferable to the Domination because it is not a slave state and is developing the North American continent of another Earth.

I have read Conquistador, about New Virginia, only once so might reread it before tackling the seventeen novels of the Nantucket-Emberverse sequence which, I gather, presents two ways of putting its characters into more primitive conditions: Nantucket is transported to the Bronze Age of what must be another timeline and technology stops working in the present. (See also the Changes series.)

I might reread Anderson's For Love And Glory, which I have also read only once. Posts about all the works mentioned here except Nantucket-Emberverse can be found by searching the blog, e.g., Angrezi Raj.

"The Tradesmen"

"The Tradesmen" is an ironic title for David Drake's Draka story. Drake shows us the horror of life - or should I say death - in a Draka War Zone. When the enemy have been driven back, irregulars are paid with gold coins to kill civilians so that the land can be cleared for Draka settlement. One Draka woman, with no estate back home, has already moved her family into the Zone and is hunting and killing noncombatant men, women and children to hasten the process. She has staked her claim to some of the land and is enriching herself at the same time.

A colonel tells her:

"'Good Christ, woman!...We have to do this; we don't have to like it!'" (Drakas!, p. 132)

They have to do it?

A neat story focusing not on military action but mainly on heated exchanges when it is disclosed that the Powers That Be have reduced the bounty for each left ear (proof of killing) from one hundred to sixty aurics.

The Draka lady's response is:

"'The hell you say, lardbelly!...The hell you say.'" (p. 134)

An irregular is even less ladylike:

"'No fucking way I let you Draka bastards cheat me!...No fucking way.'" (p. 137)

However, the moral of the story is that economic realism wins the day. This is quite a good story, although I do not fully understand the joke at the end.

Crossovers

(Custer's Last Stand.)

As far as I can see at present, the Draka anthology, Drakas!, incorporates "crossovers," or meetings, between the Draka and five individual characters who had some, real or fictional, existence before the anthology was published:

General Custer;
Gordon of Khartoum;
Anson MacDonald/Robert Heinlein;
Anne Marie Talbott writes a story in which she meets two Draka (I think);
John Barnes' cross-time traveler, Mark Strang.

That is quite a list. There are at least two ways that Poul Anderson's characters could have encountered the Draka:

Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, finding himself in the Domination timeline, would travel pastward to delete that timeline;

Draka cross-time explorers might have found their way into the Old Phoenix but would then learn that they were allowed to recuperate there briefly but not to gain any knowledge that they could use to further their cause back in their own timeline.

Timelines And Time Patrol

The Draka are true to form in John Barnes' "Upon Their Backs To Bite 'Em." They pretend to negotiate with homo sapiens but only in order to find out how to enslave them. Knowing that the Draka will do this, the multiversal alliance called ATN (I still do not know what that means) is able to plant disinformation and hopefully to set the Draka and another interversal set of slavers against each other. Here at last is an adversary that understands the Draka and turns their own actions against them.

I knew nothing of Barnes' Timeline Wars series before reading "Upon Their Backs To Bite 'Em" but this story is an excellent introduction to that series so please let me advertise the series here:

Patton's Spaceship;
Washington's Dirigible;
Caesar's Bicycle;
Timeline Wars (omnibus).

Poul Anderson's Time Patrol battles to preserve a single timeline whereas Barnes' ATN battles between timelines. Both series share the premise that history might have gone differently at key points and that subsequent generations would have experienced very different worlds.

What Next For The Draka?

From reading my posts, Ketlan has become impressed with Gwendolyn Ingolfsson. Thus, he might borrow the Draka books and discuss them here.

Sean M Brooks informs me that The Domination not only collects the first three Draka novels but also includes, as a framing device, a dialogue occurring some time after the events of the fourth novel. Thus, I need to get a copy of The Domination for the most recent information from Earth/2.

Drakas! is an excellent themed anthology. Both Harry Turtledove and David Drake know how to write about war and I will have more to say about their contributions. I must also finish reading John Barnes' fascinating story. All that is lacking, of course, is a Draka story by Poul Anderson.

However, since I am about to walk up the hill to attend a Holocaust Memorial event in Lancaster Castle, the current post must be cut short.

Timelines Overload

Get this sequence:

in Poul Anderson's mutable timeline, Neldorian time criminals help Hannibal to sack Rome and thus Carthage to win the Second Punic War but Time Patrol agents restore Roman victory;

however, in John Barnes' multiple timelines, descendants of the Carthaginians enslave more than a million timelines but are opposed by the ATN (meaning?) alliance who unite twice as many timelines;

ATN representatives visit and negotiate with SM Stirling's slave-owning Draka;

the Draka have conquered the Solar System and colonized several other planetary systems and are beginning to explore alternative timelines.

Thus, we have moved, conceptually, through four easy stages, from the Time Patrol to the Draka. I would not have believed that this was possible.

John Barnes' ATN-Draka story, "Upon Their Backs, To Bite 'Em," in Drakas!, is good but I have yet to read it to its conclusion.

Four Senses In The Bahamas

The single Draka and Samothracian on Earth/2 contend not only physically but also electronically. Because of the latter's hacking, the former's Bahamian mansion is inherited by our NYPD detective and the investment banker, now a happy couple.

"They...turned to look at the mansion. The hot Bahamian sun beat down, and the air smelled of sea and pine and sand, huge and clean. The sound of breakers on the reef came faintly over the roof."
-SM Stirling, Drakon (New York, 2000), p. 397.

Does this author consciously and deliberately address four senses or does any skilled writer automatically do so? -

the sight of a large, beautiful home;
the heat that we enjoy on holidays in such locations;
three clean smells;
the sound of the sea, not threateningly loud but safely faint.

"'And now it's all ours...'" (ibid.)

A happy ending, deserved by the characters and the reader, especially after the previous three volumes.

"Hand in hand, they walked under the arched gateway. The ironwork Drakon flared its wings above, its empty eyes staring out into the sun." (p. 398)

The Drakon flares its wings menacingly but its eyes are empty before the sun of a world free from the Domination.

Light In The Darkness

Because of the pessimism of SM Stirling's Draka series, I could not be confident that the fourth novel, Drakon, would have a conventional happy ending. It does, although the Epilogue reveals that the Draka's clone has escaped - potential sequel territory or just a reminder that history continues. Current experience is only the latest installment.

Stirling's premise:

"What...if a fragment of [the South Atlantic system of slaves and plantations] had fallen on fertile ground, and grown?" (Drakas!, p. 3)

- obliged him to show us the Draka conquering the whole Earth and building their Final Society. However, they can be defeated. First, they are prevented from annexing Earth/2. Secondly, the Archon informs Gwen that:

"'The Samothracians attacked, with moleholes in place. We stopped them, but only just." (Drakon, p. 358)

Only just! But the Draka intend to continue conquering indefinitely. That means that it is only a matter of time before they "'...run into more than [they] can handle...'" (p. 276) They have no unrealistic belief in their own undefeatability and their computers must be able to calculate how soon they are likely to experience defeat. Anyone else would ask: how can we start to avoid conflicts in order to increase the probability of our long term survival? But mere survival is of no interest to the Draka.

They will be cautious in paratemporal explorations because they know that there are post-industrial civilizations in nearby timelines. Nevertheless, such civilizations might explore cross-time and find the Draka.

They are fairly sure that there are no technological species nearby in the galaxy but:

they intend to conquer the entire galaxy;
it is possible that there are nearby civilizations whose electromagnetic signals have not yet reached the Solar System.

Thus:

no guarantee of success in any given conflict;
increasing probability of defeat over time;
no possibility that the Draka will reform themselves or pull back.

The Defeat of the Domination seems to be a long term probability and thus a possible sequel. But, in any case, this series could continue indefinitely in both space and time.

Walpurgisnacht

In James Blish's Black Easter, the magicians hope to limit the damage of their supernatural experiment by releasing the major demons on their least auspicious night, hence the title of the book. It would be unwise, for example, to add a real Walpurgisnacht to the symbolic one.

At the climax of SM Stirling's Drakon (New York, 2000), New York is blacked out as the single invading Draka fights about fifty human beings armed with futuristic weapons by her Samothracian opponent. One character rightly compares this event to "'Walpurgisnacht...'" (p. 364) Demons, or the next best thing, are loose and this could be the last night of human civilization or even of human life, the equivalent of the Final War on Earth/1.

The Draka, Gwen, has contacted the Domination timeline and spoken with the Archon who has appointed her Planetary Archon of Earth/2. Her human followers, traitors to their species, look forward to a good life, for them, under her rule. And I have not yet read to the end of the novel so I do not know the outcome.

Clever Uses Of Language

SM Stirling, Drakon (New York, 2000).

Our NYPD detective, Henry Carmaggio, refers to his futurian ally's workroom as "'...the Fortress of Solitude...'" (p. 319) and addresses him ironically as "'...Batman...'" (p. 321) These similarities to comic book characters and settings are clearly present. Thus, it is appropriate that they are acknowledged.

When Henry meets the Draka super-villainness, Gwen, her eyes are:

"...full of an ancient, innocent evil." (p. 348)

Ancient, yes. Both she and the Domination are several centuries old. But innocent evil? Literally, a contradiction. However, appropriate. Like a child torturing an animal, Gwen enjoys killing human beings and thinks that she is right to do so. Thus, about as unrepentantly evil as we can possibly imagine.

The Structures Of Series

Frank Herbert's six Dune novels are not two trilogies but a trilogy, a sequel and an unfinished second trilogy.

SM Stirling's four Draka novels are not a tetralogy but a trilogy and a sequel.

Stirling's New Virginia history is in one novel.
His Angrezi Raj history is in one novel and one story.
His Lords of Creation history is in two novels and one story.
His Domination history is in four novels and one anthology.
His other series I have yet to read.

Stirling explains the rationale of the Domination well in the Introduction to SM Stirling, Ed., Drakas (Riverdale, NY, 2000). I am not big on themed anthologies but will see how I manage with Drakas. Poul Anderson was a major contributor to themed anthologies and, of course, I appreciate, e.g., his Man-Kzin Wars stories and his Robot story as parts of his complete works.

Look at that Draka's face!