On Sun, 02 Dec 2001 15:52:05 +1300 seven@gaudaprime.com writes:

Any comments?

Comment #1: Whoa. I'm impressed.

Rest of the comments:

Despite the way Servalan seems to spend their lives like water, there is a bit of internal evidence for low troop numbers - Albion being controlled by a small force and a large bomb, for example. Then there are the mutoids. They really _don't_ have enough people they can trust to be loyal in a fight, so they use a mentally conditioned or altered alternative. It reminds me of Sparta - a small ruling population that became completely obsessed with training for war and with a certain degree of terror control over the majority of the ruled.

All this time, I've seen them on more of a Roman model (allowing for a rosier interpretation of the Roman Republic than I feel is justified), a republic or democracy that had been through some nasty wars and decayed, been corrupted, or adapted to survive into a dictatorship which still maintained certain democratic traditions and both surface and real (possibly a limited degree of real voting rights among certain citizen classes, varying also according to planet [some, with more clout, may have maintained more. Conversely, some with little importance may not have been worth the trouble to change]) democratic institutions.

Instead, if I go by this, that may have been some point in their history but, by this time, they were something else entirely. For both the military and the rulers (actual officials, like the president, as opposed to [let us say] Alpha engineers), the hard truth is that for the Federation to exist - to keep its subject worlds subject - it _must_ exercise a ruthless, terroristic control (in its distant past, the switch to democracy or republicanism may have been possible, but it isn't now precisely because of the steps they've taken to keep it going [a kind of "nobody likes me, everybody hates me, think I'll go eat worms" scenario]). Their numbers are too small for them to keep control otherwise.

The fact that many of the characters are from Earth may have obscured this. Earth is probably one of the few planets where the majority of the population are truly loyal citizens (loyal to the Federation as their nation, perhaps, rather than loyal to the powers that be). They also probably are one of the few population pools who may be regularly spared the more brutal side of Federation power and who may even have a certain range of rights and privileges that are likely to be respected by said powers. What happened to Blake (and, later, his lawyer) supports this. Here, they're willing to use a scalpel rather than a blunt instrument - the lawyer and his wife are killed when they _know_ too much and could _prove_ it rather than earlier on. Blake will be publically discredited and shipped off alive (as are other, less political criminals from Earth) rather than shot out of hand, even the little dissident group might have been ignored if they hadn't contacted Blake or produced another rabble rouser like him - but that's not the rest of the Federation, where an entire world's population can be slaughtered because of the actions of a small handful.

Dang.

Excuse while I go rewrite every B7 story idea I ever had.

Ellynne ________________________________________________________________ GET INTERNET ACCESS FROM JUNO! Juno offers FREE or PREMIUM Internet access for less! Join Juno today! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/web/.