Liner Notes For A Phoenix At Twilight
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Tommy Gunn is dead (again) doing what he does best; being betrayed while trying to keep the peace. There is one more story in TetraHedron, so we will have to explore a method of reincarnation, or have a surprise new lead character. Sounds good to me.
Anyway, the old swticheroo. It turns out the adolescent monarch and his gnomic, future-nomad advisors are manipulating the Patrol. Which doesn’t make the Phoenix League any better. They’re still world-line-altering destiny-messing-with fanatics. Not the kind of people to make pals with, even if you’re alive.
So how do you fight someone who can predict the future and bend it to their will? With great difficulty is the answer. But more seriously, if they’re not omniscient then you can try things, make it difficult, even if you’re eventually going to fail. The using randomisation to nullify the predictive powers of someone who can outsmart you I first came across in Larry Niven’s Protector, where it’s a cool idea that effects the plot not at all.
So what’s Gunn’s mistake here? Is it trusting too much, because going the opposite way is going to make for ruthless and murderous encounters. Is it failing to get on a war footing? Again this has the potential to escalate violence. Am I suggesting that you can go through a dimensional gate with good intentions and bad intelligence and still get killed and fail?
A bit dark that for a knockabout space opera. Or rather no, no it isn’t because without a threat of appropriate magnitude how can our heroes justify trekking the galaxy disrupting cultures and getting involved in events that otherwise aren’t really their business?
If this has a weakness it’s that nothing is resolved, and that’s because it all happens in the next story. An if these liner notes have a weakness then it’s that everything gets explained in the last story, and everything that doesn’t will be in the liner notes there.
Sorry about that.
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