(urth) Ships and Empires

[David Stockhoff]

Doesn't it all depend on the kind of empire you are thinking of? There 
are rigid empires and flexible ones; personal ones (like Napoleon's and 
Alexander's) and more structured ones. These handle distance differently.

Consider how long it took British ships to reach India.

Consider that when Peter the Great died, it took about 5 years for this 
news to reach Paris.

Consider that the Persian Empire consisted of satrapies which had to be 
reconquered every few decades even under Cyrus.

Egypt under the Sultans was independent for decades but showed up as 
Turkish on maps long after the British co-opted it, because the Bey was 
nominally loyal to the Sultan.

When parts of Central Asia became independent in the 1880s, it took the 
Chinese 10 years to take it back. Each year their army campaigned, 
stopped to plant crops, overwintered, and moved on again. No one in the 
West took any notice except the British and the Russians.

But communications in the Roman Empire were comparatively rapid due to 
technology and the Middle Sea, and so we naturally relate to that kind 
of highly structured empire.

If your ships are constantly going out among the stars, you will have 
ships reaching the provinces as often as you have ships going out. If 
you have an elite in place in that world or a little king who depends on 
your support (say, blast pistols delivered annually), you don't need to 
go out there personally even every four years.

Even if every planet is relatively autonomous, it can still be part of 
an empire, if the empire is a nominal one or a mercantile one. I think 
this is why Wolfe doesn't go into the details---it's not worth it. 
Typhon's empire could have lasted only a century (like the American 
Empire will) and still stand as a high mark in human interstellar power.


On 12/11/2010 2:02 PM, Andrew Mason wrote:
> If they were just nearly as fast as light, they would have taken four
> years to reach the nearest star. (Actually, of course, the stars
> should have moved, but Wolfe seems to be ignoring that.) Can you
> really be said to rule a land it takes four years to get to? You can
> if you have FTL communication even without FTL travel, a la Ursula K.
> Le Guin or Orson Scott Card, but I see no hint of that in Wolfe. Yes,
> perhaps he was sending expedtions to the nearer stars, but I still
> think he's exaggerating when he said he ruled them.


---
avast! Antivirus: Outbound message clean.
Virus Database (VPS): 101211-1, 12/11/2010
Tested on: 12/11/2010 3:21:03 PM
avast! - copyright (c) 1988-2010 AVAST Software.
http://www.avast.com