Raw Feed (2004): What If?: The World’s Foremost Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been, ed. There was a follow up volume I have not read. The alternate history continues with a collection of essays from various historians and popular writers, a modern sequel of sorts to If It Had Happened Otherwise. Love is never so simple or instinctive a matter. The only flaw of story was the rather cliched early description of their romance, and Kathryn “instinctively” choosing a figure like Argos. Nice touch in Earth being liberate, and an empire being established, but this is subordinated to the poignancy of narrator losing his love. Excitement and desperation and the degradation of servitude were all well-depicted. Not a pleasant character but realistic one. He is a cold, manipulative, ruthless character who unsentimentally realizes what desperate measures need to be taken. Manuel Argos, who brings order out of an environment obviously reminiscent of late Republican Rome though he is personality-wise, no Augustus. Anderson has a talent for invoking flavor of epic in language. Pournelle, in introduction, goes further with rationalizing space barbarians (How, in story, did they get the tech to begin with?) than Anderson does. I only remembered the bit with a slave revolt, but I liked this story the second time as well. “ The Star Plunderer”, Poul Anderson - First read this story in Brian Aldiss’ excellent anthology Galactic Empires. Technically, story is interesting in that all military action occurs off-stage and story is a “thought-piece” on historical and political matters. Would have liked more on future Earth history and how global government founded. Extensive surgery and conditioning of main character was reminiscent (or, rather, predates) Joe Haldeman’s All My Sins Remembered. “ In Clouds of Glory”, Algis Budrys - Good story but would liked more exploration of how Agency would open way for an Earth empire. He also well shows the advantages of empire and that empires can take many forms including the possibility the U.S. “ Introduction: Empire”, Jerry Pournelle - Pournelle logically expounds on the thesis that empire is the government most natural to man and that its time, no matter what democracies naively think, is not done. Raw Feed (1987): Imperial Stars, Vol 1.: The Stars at War, eds. Unfortunately, this is the only one of his anthologies I have complete notes on. The fiction selections were reprints and writers selected from the slush pile. The Jerry Pournelle series continues with a look at one of his anthologies that characteristically mixed fiction (not always science fiction either) and nonfiction. Hetaira has much more water than Thalassa. They circle a common center of gravity in a system with both yellow and red dwarf stars. Like The Petrified Planet, the story starts with astronomical history, here the planets Thalassa and Hetaira came to be. The framing device of having a Terro-Human Federation starship show up was a Kurland addition. Michael Kurland made some minor changes and revisions to it, but this version largely matches Piper’s original manuscript. Piper wrote this story, originally called “The Heavenly Twins”, for the fourth proposed volume which was also to include stories by James Blish and Murray Leinster. The next two proposed installments, science fiction anthologies, were never published. The next Twayne Triplet was a fantasy anthology called Witches Three. Piper’s Uller Uprising was written for the first in the series, The Petrified Planet. They were the first of what we now called “shared-world anthologies”. First Cycle was written about 1953 for the Twayne Triplets series from Twayne Books. Carr in Typewriter Killer only mentions it seven times in the body of that book. This novel doesn’t get a lot of respect among Piper fans and scholars.
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