Sunday 20 September 2015

Enemies And Threats

Recently (here), I compared Poul Anderson's Time Patrol and his Terran Empire. Both have external enemies. Neldorians and Exaltationists try to change the history guarded by the Patrol. The Merseian Roidhunate (I said) tries to destroy the Empire. However, that was a British understatement. The Roidhunate aims not merely to destroy the Empire but also to domesticate or exterminate humanity, thus to destroy the very freedom and creativity that are what we value about being human. We can live with the loss of an Empire but not with its replacement by the Roidhunate. (We also learn that not all beings of Merseian descent support the Roidhunate any more than all Germans supported the Third Reich.)

The other parallels that I drew between Patrol and Empire were valid. Each faces an inner threat. Quantum processes in space-time-energy can change history. The Empire itself is a stage in the decline of Technic civilization caused by the cartelization of the Polesotechnic League. Are the Danellians and the Commonalty free from such threats? I would argue that the civilization represented by the Commonalty and its contemporary civilizations in other spiral arms have become so vast and widespread that no process of decay or decline can affect all of them simultaneously. I had thought that the Danellians somehow transcended time but, of course, that was an unwarranted assumption. We know nothing about them and their future civilization might also decline. Human beings are forbidden to travel to the Danellian Era let alone beyond it but what might there be beyond it?

2 comments:

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Paul!

Your remarks here reminded me of how Merseians eventually settled on the planet Dennitza, in the Empire. And made plain their dislike of the racist ideology dominating the Roidhunate. I even speculated in one of my letters to Poul Anderson that the Empire would be a natural place of refuge for those non Merseians fleeing the tyranny of the Roidhunate. And that could include those Merseians who disliked the dominant ideology of racial supremacism. I had in mind as well the examples of people who fled the despotism of the USSR and its satellites.

I also agree that the post Imperial civilizations which emerged after the Long Night, including the Commonalty, would not all fall or collapse at the same time. But, eventually, that is what will happen to them. And I believe Danellian civilization is also mortal and will not last forever for all eternity.

Sean

Jim Baerg said...

Somewhat related in the SF of other authors.

In the backstory to "A Deepness in the Sky" by Vernor Vinge, humanity has had STL interstellar travel for millennia & is settled in many solar systems. However, Vinge assumes for story purposes that there are many ways to trash a high tech civilization & most civilizations in various solar systems last at most a few millennia before stumbling over one of those ways & have collapsed to pre-industrial conditions before rebuilding. Something the people of humanly settled worlds are trying to do is maintain communications so that when one culture collapses, other cultures get clues about what not to do. "Outcasts of the Heaven Belt" by Joan D. Vinge, shows the aftermath such problems in one solar system.