Hi David. > Terrence Fugate wrote: > >> I suspect the 'fatalism' is HBP's belief that all polities have a >> limited life span. > > No, it's more than that. > > Why was Conn Maxwell able to use Merlin for planning, but Foxx Travis couldn't even try to create a post-collapse core of civilization? Why attempt to destroy Merlin because it might alter the course of events? Think of the possibility of Foxx Travis throwing his influence behind Poictesme? These are the sort of questions that leave me wondering about "another Merlin" back on Terra. I buy Beam's explanation for why Travis and his officers, who had fought a long war to a punishing victory, might do this. But that doesn't explain why folks back on Terra would stand for it (even if some of them didn't want to be "upstaged" by a computer) -- especially of they had another Merlin at their disposal. Cheers, David -- "A robot was nothing but steel and plastic and magnetized tape and photo-micro-positronic circuits, whereas a man . . . was nothing but tissues and cells and colloids and electro-neuronic circuits. There was a difference; anybody knew that. The trouble was that he had never met anybody -- which included physicists, biologists, psychologists, psionicists, philosophers and theologians -- who could define the difference in satisfactorily exact terms." - H. Beam Piper, "Ministry of Disturbance"
