The Reign of Hans
"The Warriors from Nowhere" in its entirety
A Knight Of Ghosts And Shadows in its entirety
The Reign Of Dietrich
(between volumes)
The Reign Of Gerhart
A Stone In Heaven, excluding the lengthy alien viewpoint passages
just three chapters of The Game Of Empire
Despite having discussed all of these works before, I found many new observations to make. However, for the time being at least, I have exhausted the theme of this character, Flandry, in this period, the Molitor dynasty. So what is next? I am currently reading for the first time SM Stirling's The Golden Princess which will generate more posts.
There might be a delay while the current lap top is being replaced.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Recently, I was esp. interested by Stirling's comments about how a tough, smart, competent ruler could try to ensure that his successor was as like him as possible by using cloning technology to get a clone of himself. A fascinating notion!
Why didn't I remember how Edwin Cairncross was thinking along similar lines in A STONE IN HEAVEN? Drat!
Sean
Sean:
In the *Sten* series by Alan Cole and Chris Bunch, the Emperor secretly used automated cloning AND brain-pattern downloading to make his successor BE himself: memories, personality, and all. That's why he was known, after something over two thousand years of his rule (and "more than one hundred sixty assassination attempts, only three of which had been successful"), as the "Eternal Emperor."
He was tough, smart, competent — and managed to seem, through much of the series, like a basically easy-going and likable fellow, too. He said once, "And since I am sane and since I am ... always, I provide absolute stability to the galaxy."
And then the machinery got damaged, and he came back from his latest death rather WARPED....
Kaor, DAVID!
I can't dismiss the possibility of cloning humans because we KNOW animals have been successfully cloned. Which means, while I don't like artificial human cloning, I expect it to happen (if it hasn't, already).
The Cole/Bunch stories about the "Eternal Emperor" certainly interesting and worth looking up. The bit about something going wrong at the Emperor's latest cloning/memory downloading is intriguing.
While I believe human cloning is more than possible, I am not at all sure it will be POSSIBLE to scme how scan and download a human's personality pattern and memories into a cloned. To say nothing of the ethical objections I could make to a child not being allowed to develop his own personality, good or bad. Altho we do see Poul Anderson experimenting with such ideas in his HARVEST OF STARS books.
Btw, I had Mike Havel, the first Lord Bear, in mind as my idea of a tough, smart, competent, reasonably decent ruler.
Sean
Post a Comment