Book description
If it pleased Ruethen of the Long Hand to give a feast and ball at the
Crystal Moon for his enemies. He knew they must come. Pride of race had
slipped from Terra, while the need to appear well-bred and sophisticated
had waxed correspondingly. The fact that spaceships prowled and fought,
fifty light-years beyond Antares, made it all the more impossible a
gaucherie to refuse an invitation from the Mersian representative.
Besides, one could feel delightfully wicked and ever so delicately in
danger It is the common fate of empires to grow old and jaded: Rome,
Byzantium, Britain, America, and so on to the Empire of Terra itself,
each has near the end succumbed to the same weary
"sophistication" that allows a warlord of Merseia to make a
mock of a race whose star-conquering ancestors found the Merseians a
race of pre-technic barbarians huddled in stone piles - and saved them
from extinction. Flandry himself has come to understand that there is no
more point to all his victories than that a few trillion of his fellow
creatures may live out their lives before the coming of the Long Night
of galactic barbarism. That he will not have shortened that coming Dark
Age one bit - only postponed it. That the barbarians always win in the
end, and are always followed by a new round of civilisation Poul
Anderson (1926-2001) was born in Pennsylvania of Scandinavian stock. He
started publishing science fiction in 1947 and became one the great
figures in the genre, serving as President of the Science Fiction
Writers of America, winning multiple Hugo and Nebula awards, and was
named a SFWA Grand Master. He collaborated regularly with wife, Karen,
and their daughter is married to noted SF writer Greg Bear. Poul
Anderson died in July 2001.
