Guess Which Australian Survived Th Changed...
- Thread starter Malta
- Start date
I really liked the Australian chapter.
That said, I do get "Rudi"-like (the Author Saving Throw type, not the Mary Sue type.....it's sad that we have to specify when discussing Rudi, isn't it?) bad vibes from some of the 3rd Generation setup. Specifically:
Now that populations are bouncing back towards what the technology (basically mid-19th Century, for all practical purposes...with upticks in Medicine and Theory) can sustain....you could easily have Napoleonic-scale warfare (with 1500's-esque weapons). I sneer at 20,000-man "armies"!
*-inheritance seems to change at a whim (of Stirling's). Older children (the Twins, Eilir, etc) are frequently never mentioned as potential claimants to their parents' offices...in favor of younger children (Rudi, Mike Jr). Suddenly, though, the eldest inherits the senior post (High Queen) automatically. Yes, Rudi knew ahead of time, but that's not shown to be a factor.
**-did anyone ever catch exactly how it was explained that Mathilda went from "would like to marry him, but it's too much of an issue" to "might marry him, if it can be worked out" to "am marrying him"?
That said, I do get "Rudi"-like (the Author Saving Throw type, not the Mary Sue type.....it's sad that we have to specify when discussing Rudi, isn't it?) bad vibes from some of the 3rd Generation setup. Specifically:
- The two children of Rudi and Mathilda each chose one of their parents' religions.....and, of course, the eldest (who will be High King automatically, for some* reason) chooses Paganism, so we can be sure to have a Pagan at the top.....and the youngest (John) chose Catholicism, so we conveniently have no barrier to one of Mathilda's children inheriting the Protectorship. Of course.
- A Trans-Pacific war is going to be an extremely hard sell (it was hard enough in 1941, never mind a setting without Steam). Both to the Reader and to the Montivalans (I still hate that name, for some reason). Yeah, everybody lurved Rudi and hates CUT'ers....but I imagine not enough to spend vast treasures and lives fighting in the Far East. I anticipate/fear/dread a handwave.
- Prince John marries the Empress. I officially call it now.
- Still not happy with the way the dangling plotlines/character arcs were brutally cut, in the last 1/3 of The Given Sacrifice. The Twins, the Squires, and Yseult all got pretty raw deals (Asgerd didn't even appear!). Tiphaine and Bjarni didn't come out much better off. Killing Rudi only buys so much goodwill.
- It would be really, really, really, nice to see the "Good" Powers drop some "buffs" (spells, magic weapons, etc) on someone other than the Pagans (Wiccans and Asatru) of North America. If Juniper can cast "Sleep" and "Fear" on the battlefield, like it's WoW....where are the Catholic knights who are unstoppable killing machines because they are just that pure of heart (Ignatius comes close, but not really)? Where's King-Emperor (Willie's Kid)'s magic halberd?
- It would also be really, really, really, nice if there was some tension in the "Good" hero camp. Seriously, the last bunch (Rudi and the Montivalan leadership) made the TNG Bridge Crew look like bomb-throwing anarchists. Show us somebody who is on the side of "Good", and is as powerful/influential as Orlaith....but fundamentally disagrees with her. The closest person to Rudi's stature was Mathilda....and she was in love** with him.
- The "raven pecking the forehead" thing was stupid and narmy the first time 'round. Repetition has not improved it.
Now that populations are bouncing back towards what the technology (basically mid-19th Century, for all practical purposes...with upticks in Medicine and Theory) can sustain....you could easily have Napoleonic-scale warfare (with 1500's-esque weapons). I sneer at 20,000-man "armies"!
*-inheritance seems to change at a whim (of Stirling's). Older children (the Twins, Eilir, etc) are frequently never mentioned as potential claimants to their parents' offices...in favor of younger children (Rudi, Mike Jr). Suddenly, though, the eldest inherits the senior post (High Queen) automatically. Yes, Rudi knew ahead of time, but that's not shown to be a factor.
**-did anyone ever catch exactly how it was explained that Mathilda went from "would like to marry him, but it's too much of an issue" to "might marry him, if it can be worked out" to "am marrying him"?
Last edited:
Actually the Catholics did all Demon Hunter during The Lord of Mountains when the focus was on Tiphaine and the Liu Heirs. Especially with the latter's mother becoming possessed and the Portland's Clergy showing up to Exorcise the place. Plus we see the Virgin Lady in two separate visions by two different characters and what more could you want from MT Angel BadAssery?
As for the Pacific War I have my doubts that it will involve all of Montival, certainly a reckoning with the Haida is coming up but I think the affair in Korea will be somewhat smaller, perhaps with a small expeditionary fleet. As for how the Chosen will be defeated it is still up in the air.
I think the Twins abdicated in favor of Mike jr because it seems rather likely they will inherit the responsibilities of the Dunedain, actually I think there was a mention. I also think it came together for Rudi and Matti at some point during Tears of the Sun and Lord of Mountains.
I think Stirling dropped mention of a separate series focusing on Norrheim at some point.
As for the Pacific War I have my doubts that it will involve all of Montival, certainly a reckoning with the Haida is coming up but I think the affair in Korea will be somewhat smaller, perhaps with a small expeditionary fleet. As for how the Chosen will be defeated it is still up in the air.
I think the Twins abdicated in favor of Mike jr because it seems rather likely they will inherit the responsibilities of the Dunedain, actually I think there was a mention. I also think it came together for Rudi and Matti at some point during Tears of the Sun and Lord of Mountains.
I think Stirling dropped mention of a separate series focusing on Norrheim at some point.
Well....
#1) That's unlikely, as Stirling is often more focused on the "aristocrats"/leadership, even in the books (like ISOT) where the culture is a democracy....so I don't see him making a big deal out of restoring Liberal Democracy for its own sake.
#2) What peasants? After the Protector's War, it seems like even the PPA is an OK place to live....with "peasant" being more a descriptor of "agricultural non-Associate", rather than code for "is oppressed". The Barons seem forced to literally compete for peasants, due to them being able to "vote with their feet".
#3) A lot of the cultures (including ALL of the Meeting/Montival cultures) originate out of a small core of coherent survivors (even in the case of the Associates)...so the current setup is how most people who matter (i.e. even the Middle Class types, who are usually themselves raised by people who benefited from the setup initially) want it.
#4) Time and Distance issues perforce make even "democracy" less democratic the further up you go (as more issues have to be kicked up to yet another level of delegation, further removed from the individual voter a hundred/thousand miles away). So Baron Bob is pretty much as good as Congressman Pete....and might be better, since he's more immediately available to the average farmer in the Barony (and has a long-term stake in his farmers/yeoman not being pissed off at him).
#5) The initial cadre of feudal/warlord/emergency leaders (Havel, Juniper, etc, even Sandra) were charismatic and talented....and, obviously, successful (which is the litmus test of legitimacy, in the end). Time hasn't had a chance to be a factor, yet, and no rot has yet accumulated in the systems (Boise being an exception) to counteract the charisma/success and undercut the legitimacy of the "modern" system.
#6) By this point, any "revolution" is as likely to lead to new versions of the current system as it is to a revival of 20th Century democracy. A lot of the "domino" effect (and infrastructure) that led to the 19th/20th Century wave of democratization is effectively gone. Liberal Democracy is no longer the default setting (though that may change as populations start working their way back to "dense").
#7) Historically, democratization was driven by the Middle Classes (and Upper Class groups who didn't have sufficient power in the current structure)...not by rural peasants/farmers (who were usually reliably anti-democracy, as in Revolutionary France). As it is, the Middle Classes in Montival seem to be too busy becoming Upper Class (due to expansion, economic development, etc).
#8) In the outright feudal realms (basically the PPA), the ruling class more or less owns a monopoly on force...and would have to actively encourage a change in the situation (such as raising/training/arming militias structured to defeat heavy cavalry, which is hard and expensive). Obviously, the Associates aren't going to do this (even arming townsfolk with crossbows for wall defense was a tough sell, initially).
#9) In pretty much every other realm (that isn't a smoking ruin at the end of the CUT War), where the People hold an arguable majority of military power (Corvallis, MacKenzies, Boise)....they are pretty democratic at the point of contact (elected leaders, even if it's just a rubber stamp for an heir....and democratic local government in towns/duns). The MacKenzies are (at the moment, before any rot has set in) way more democratic than Athens was.
IOW, democracy, in its liberal-democracy 20th Century form....just isn't relevant to the people who already have decent governance (even actual democracy) and safety. If that qualification changes, you might see attitudes shift....but it still isn't likely to produce parliamentary democracy or one-man-one-vote.
Last edited:
Meatshield,
I agree with most of what you wrote, but one place Stirling completely messed up was the USB. Their core survivors made democray a core value. And even the coup by the General's son and his friends should has made the public so quickly accept a King.
I agree with most of what you wrote, but one place Stirling completely messed up was the USB. Their core survivors made democray a core value. And even the coup by the General's son and his friends should has made the public so quickly accept a King.
While the US of Boise was somewhat preached to be focused on the Democratic values it was run by The Military and thus the mindset of order and a measure of loyalty was spread. Hence why it took so long for the Boiseans to turn against the CUT.
Take the description of Boise as The Quest made their way through the region, it was described as being very, very ordered of what you would expect from a soldier's concern for well folded beds and ordinances followed to the letter.
We see less of this in USB territories away from Boise such as around Nez Perce territory and the former holdings of Duke Iron Rod which were somewhat indebted to Havel and his children.
Boise was a state with a (elected before the Change, and still in office) civilian government (the State Legislature) that was led by the guy who was also the actual military CinC, with "Emergency Powers for the Duration". The Emergency never quite ended....but the General-President did such a good job of keeping things together that he would have won any election, anyway.
Martin's coup was a function of the 2nd Generation (raised by the men & women who were governing as a junta) not wanting to give up their "inheritance" (i.e. if elections were held, most would not get their parents' positions). The CUT involvement made things even worse.
I do agree that the easy way that Boiseans seem to forget that Thurston, Sr always meant to have elections, and adopt Fred as "Hereditary <whatever>"....is a bit much. OTOH, we already saw it happen with the Bearkillers (where Signe makes everyone forget that Mike wanted nothing to do with hereditary anything).
Martin's coup was a function of the 2nd Generation (raised by the men & women who were governing as a junta) not wanting to give up their "inheritance" (i.e. if elections were held, most would not get their parents' positions). The CUT involvement made things even worse.
I do agree that the easy way that Boiseans seem to forget that Thurston, Sr always meant to have elections, and adopt Fred as "Hereditary <whatever>"....is a bit much. OTOH, we already saw it happen with the Bearkillers (where Signe makes everyone forget that Mike wanted nothing to do with hereditary anything).
There was a coup during the "chaos" (as the regular leadership was failing to control the situation) right after the Change. Some state government personnel and the State Police (it's implied that the National Guard staff was involved, too) placed one of their own in charge as Governor (I forget if the elected Governor was missing, or was "removed"). That was Heaselrod, Sr.
Apparently, the first act of the new regime was to drop the bridges over the Mississippi, so that the hordes of starving refugees from Illinois and Michigan were bottled up on the other side. Basically, Heaselrod was Iowa's Norman Arminger, but with the State Police, National Guard, and the various sheriffs and farmers (read: local benevolent warlords) to keep him fairly in line.
Ah, right. Great big wankers they were-just without the Medieval Background that Arminger had.
I got part of your answer from Kier.
I got part of your answer from Kier.
Stirling doesn't think that though. It took literally apocalyptic conditions that wiped out the majority of the population. They talk about it a little bit in DTF about how Arminger is jumping the gun with going to Kings and Castles and that human civilization first needed to sort of go through a tribal phase of reinventing itself to fit to the new setting.
Besides, the PPA was the only hard core Monarchist government after the Change mostly because of Arminger and the large number of thugs and mafia he co-opted. There is Corvalis, CORA, Yakima, Warm Springs and a dozen other smaller polities that maintained some form of outright democracy. Reading DTF neither Mike or Juniper wanted to become "Lady Juniper" or "Lord Bear" and they protested against it on multiple occasions. The Mackenzie's in particular are sort of tribal democratic, after Juniper's death they elected someone else as their "Tanist". As for the Bearkillers Mike does complain in "The Protector's War" about how the set up of their society would lead to an A-Lister Elite in an conversation with Hutton or Elder Larsson, but after Mike's death and with the Sun Riselands focus from a POV is shifted away from the Bearkillers so we don't figure out if that was settled or how. Granted even in today's Democratic politics it is not unheard of for the popularity of the father or mother to spread to the son or daughter (Kennedys and Buschs and such).
EDIT:
Actually a point brought up to me was that it wasn't until the 2nd-3rd generations that anyone started to use the title of King and such. Arminger settled for "Protector" and the Heaselrods went with "Provisional President" and most governments had some mention of the United States like in Boise, Corvallis, and Iowa.
Last edited:
I note that you cherry-picked the 1/9th of my post to reply to specifically. My point in making nine....err, points...was that the confluence of events and factors was what let things degenerate to the point that the pre-1998 facts on the ground simply no longer applied to the people who came out the other end of the Change Year.
If it was only the loss of communications infrastructure...or only the shift in military power between sections of the population...or only the loss of the pre-Change government...or only the survivor cores adopting "it works for us" forms of government...or only the loss of 99% of the population...or only a year of utter chaos and devastation...or only the fact that the "new" systems have credibility by virtue of actually having worked for the people who came out the other end...
But it wasn't. It was all of these things hitting the World at once. The effect was a sea-change in human affairs.
18th Century America was a contiguous development of what came before. There is very, very little continuity between 1997 and 1999, in the Emberverse. The government and society did not "evolve" into another form, it was flatly gone....and that which replaced it came out of an environment so alien to what had come before that it might as well have been on another planet.
By the end of the winter of 1998-1999...there are no Americans left (even in Boise). Only people who identify as "Us" (where "Us" is "MacKenzies", "The Outfit", "Corvallis"). "All politics is local" has suddenly been actually true for as long as people's recent memories can usefully recall (i.e. since the Change).
People aren't ruled by kings, in CY 29. They are led/governed by the people and systems that they know. They don't think about Rudi or Juniper or Mike Jr in the same way a 1895 Prussian shopkeeper thought about the Kaiser. It's still too intimate, and too close to their own experiences. The rulers still have that very real stamp of approval by their subjects (how they became rulers to begin with).
Moreover, you keep saying "democracy". What do you mean by that? Why are the MacKenzies or Bearkiller or Corvallis not democratic, in your opinion?
Last edited:
Where Stirling makes a mistake is having all these vastly important decisions be made the way he wants the narrative to run....but failing to set them up in advance.
- Signe just demands her son inherit Mike's position...despite Mike publically declaring the exact opposite...and all the Bearkillers just fall in line (despite there being several people with better claims on the position than Mike Jr...who will be a nonentity for another decade).
- The MacKenzies elect Daughter #3 as Tanist (after Rudi throws them aside in his mad quest for power)....and the one dude who starts to suggest electing someone not from Juniper's family is growled back into his seat....and all the MacKenzies go along with it (despite the probability that one or more serious people would make a play for the election, despite disapproval).
- Boise....I mentioned before.
Likewise, the Bearkillers suddenly have a massive Asatru population, that somehow arose ex nihilo during the time between the first and second trilogies. With no previous evidence of something like that occurring in the decade between books 1 and 3. It gets waved off as "Signe returning to her roots" (oh, and she's a sorceress, too).
There's way too much "Oh, that was worked out offscreen...let's move on!" in these books...and too much of that eventually turns out to be critical to the plot, or critical to the individual characters. Look at Mary Havel....she goes from a failed pass at Ingolf to him effectively agreeing to marry her...in between two of the scenes (that they share). Likewise Mathilda's "will she, won't she?" dilemma over marrying Rudi.
I am inclined to believe that the Bearkillers and Mackenzies are still in the "Honeymoon" phase with the line of Mike and Juniper, He does have a tendency to not cover all of the details and things pop up off screen.
Though I like his policy of letting readers fill in certain gaps like with the Hutton and Colorado series.
Oh, and from the author himself regarding more on the former CUT
Though I like his policy of letting readers fill in certain gaps like with the Hutton and Colorado series.
Oh, and from the author himself regarding more on the former CUT
Ooooooooo
New Fanfic by Pete! Greeks in Egypt!!!!
http://www.ipinc.net/~kiers/SMSFanFiction/Ship.html
Spoilers:
The Greek War with the Turks must have been terrible.
New Fanfic by Pete! Greeks in Egypt!!!!
http://www.ipinc.net/~kiers/SMSFanFiction/Ship.html
Spoilers:
The Greek War with the Turks must have been terrible.
Last edited:
Well if I'm being honest I read these books because the worlds are interesting, none of the characters were ever particularly interesting. Rudi least of all since everything around him seemed to be just so badly contrived, such as all politics instantly becoming good for him or everyone liking him and no one really seriously objecting to his rule.
Yeah the bold there is the biggest thing that bugs me. There is zero tension in these novels and no character drama/growth.