AccueilGroupesDiscussionsPlusTendances
Site de recherche
Ce site utilise des cookies pour fournir nos services, optimiser les performances, pour les analyses, et (si vous n'êtes pas connecté) pour les publicités. En utilisant Librarything, vous reconnaissez avoir lu et compris nos conditions générales d'utilisation et de services. Votre utilisation du site et de ses services vaut acceptation de ces conditions et termes.

Résultats trouvés sur Google Books

Cliquer sur une vignette pour aller sur Google Books.

Chargement...

The Anarch Lords

par A. Bertram Chandler

Autres auteurs: Voir la section autres auteur(e)s.

Séries: Commander Grimes (book 10), Abenteuer Randwelt (13), John Grimes Chronology (13), John Grimes Rimworld (24)

MembresCritiquesPopularitéÉvaluation moyenneMentions
1032262,320 (3.44)1
John Grimes' career as a space pirate has ended. Now he faces his toughest assignment yet. He has been made governor of the anarchists' own planet. His first task is to stay alive--with a whole world plotting his murder
Aucun
Chargement...

Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre

Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre.

» Voir aussi la mention 1

2 sur 2
review of
A. Bertram Chandler's The Anarch Lords
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - May 10, 2016

See the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/442383-taking-the-lords

I'm not familiar w/ Chandler, I hadn't previously read anything by him, I've probably seen bks by him, I probably expected this to be stupider than it turned out to be b/c I wasn't sure whether Chandler was using the self-contradiction of the title ironically or ignorantly. Fortunately, it was the latter so this turned out to be a fun read after all.

The "DEDICATION":

"For Vice-Admiral William Bligh R.N., one-time commanding officer of the H.M.S. Bounty, one-time Governor of New South Wales, with belated apologies for the participation of an ancestral Grimes in the Rum Rebellion of 1808 A.D." - p 4

Right off the Batman (subverted sports metaphor) Chandler has me wondering what he's up to & whether he's being ironic again.

"The mutiny on the Royal Navy vessel HMS Bounty occurred in the south Pacific on 28 April 1789. Disaffected crewmen, led by Acting Lieutenant Fletcher Christian, seized control of the ship from their captain Lieutenant William Bligh and set him and 18 loyalists adrift in the ship's open launch. The mutineers variously settled on Tahiti or on Pitcairn Island. Bligh meanwhile completed a voyage of more than 3,500 nautical miles (6,500 km; 4,000 mi) in the launch to reach safety, and began the process of bringing the mutineers to justice.

"Bounty had left England in 1787 on a mission to collect and transport breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. A five-month layover in Tahiti, during which many of the men lived ashore and formed relationships with native Polynesians, proved harmful to discipline. Relations between Bligh and his crew deteriorated after he began handing out increasingly harsh punishments, criticism and abuse, Christian being a particular target. After three weeks back at sea, Christian and others forced Bligh from the ship. Twenty-five men remained on board afterwards, including loyalists held against their will and others for whom there was no room in the launch.

"Bligh reached England in April 1790, whereupon the Admiralty despatched HMS Pandora to apprehend the mutineers. Fourteen were captured in Tahiti and imprisoned on board Pandora, which then searched without success for Christian's party that had hidden on Pitcairn Island. After turning back toward England, Pandora ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef, with the loss of 31 crew and 4 prisoners from Bounty. The 10 surviving detainees reached England in June 1792 and were court martialled; 4 were acquitted, 3 were pardoned, and 3 were hanged.

"Christian's group remained undiscovered on Pitcairn until 1808, by which time only one mutineer, John Adams, remained alive. Almost all his fellow mutineers, including Christian, had been killed, either by each other or by their Polynesian companions. No action was taken against Adams; descendants of the mutineers and their Tahitian consorts live on Pitcairn into the 21st century. The generally accepted view of Bligh as an overbearing monster and Christian as a tragic victim of circumstances, as depicted in well-known film accounts, has been challenged by late 20th- and 21st-century historians from whom a more sympathetic picture of Bligh has emerged." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutiny_on_the_Bounty

Since I'd only been ever-so-slightly acquainted w/ the history of this mutiny from the 1935 &/or 1962 movies, both of wch I think were sympathetic to the mutineers, I suspected Chandler of pulling some tongue-in-cheek. As it is, he's apparently in the crew of "late 20th- and 21st-century historians from whom a more sympathetic picture of Bligh has emerged." I wasn't expecting that so it piqued my interest.

More from Chandler on Bligh:

"In long ago Australia, however, there had been three classes of colonist—the wealthy squatters, the small farmers and the laborers who, in the very early days, had been convicts. More than one governor had sided with the little men against the big landowners. Some of them had been socially ostracized by the self-made aristocracy. One of them, the immensely capable but occasionally tactless Bligh, had been deposed by his own garrison, the New South Wales Corps, the officers of which were already squatters or in the process of becoming such." - p 121

"He recalled having read somewhere that Bligh—the much and unjustly maligned Bligh—had been, by the standards of his time, an exceptionally humane captain. He had put his crews on three watches, four hours on and eight hours off." - p 172

""But that wouldn't be the same, Agatha. Look at what happened in New South Wales. Governor Bligh was deposed—and then what could he do? He got no support from his Lieutenant Governor in Tasmania. He returned to England and was, to all intents and purposes, swept under the mat. Oh, Major Johnston was, eventually, brought to trial but received little more than a rap over the knuckles—and that after leading an armed mutiny!["]" - p 181

HHmm.. That's quite a different story from the one presented in the films. Perhaps Chandler was an historian, he references Liberia next:

""Have you ever heard of Liberia?"

""In Africa?"

""No. Not the province. The planet. The colony."

""Oh. That Liberia. Founded by a bunch of freedom-loving anarchists during the days of the gaussjammers. I've heard about it but I've never been there."

""How would you like to go?"

""Doing what? Or as what?"

""As Governor."" - p 8

Already my fancy is tickled. I like the idea of Liberia:

"Liberia Listeni/laɪˈbɪəriə/, officially the Republic of Liberia, is a country on the West African coast. Liberia means "Land of the Free" in Latin."

[..]

"The Republic of Liberia, beginning as a settlement of the American Colonization Society (ACS), declared its independence on July 26, 1847. The United States did not recognize Liberia's independence until during the American Civil War on February 5, 1862. Between January 7, 1822 and the American Civil War, more than 15,000 freed and free-born Black Americans from United States and 3,198 Afro-Caribbeans relocated to the settlement. The Black American settlers carried their culture with them to Liberia. The Liberian constitution and flag were modeled after the United States. In January 3, 1848 Joseph Jenkins Roberts, a wealthy free-born Black American from Virginia who settled in Liberia, was elected as Liberia's first president after the people proclaimed independence." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberia

Liberia having been a product of the repatriation of former slaves in the US seems like an excellent idea to me & Chandler's association of it w/ anarchists ups the ante(bellum). Making it even more rich for me is that one of my favorite poets, Melvin B. Tolson, was the African Liberia's Poet Laureate. Here's an excerpt from a review I wrote about Tolson's "Harlem Gallery" and Other Poems:

""Libretto for the Republic of Liberia

"Liberia has a fascinating history:

""The founding of Liberia in the early 1800s was motivated by the domestic politics of slavery and race in the United States as well as by U.S. foreign policy interests. In 1816, a group of white Americans founded the American Colonization Society (ACS) to deal with the problem of the growing number of free blacks in the United States by resettling them in Africa. The resulting state of Liberia would become the second (after Haiti) black republic in the world at that time.

""Prominent Americans such as Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, and John Randolph were among the best known members of ACS. Former President Thomas Jefferson publicly supported the organization's goals, and President James Madison arranged public funding for the Society. The motives for joining the society were vast as a range of people from abolitionists to slaveholders counted themselves members. On the other hand, many abolitionists, both black and white, ultimately rejected the notion that it was impossible for the races to integrate and therefore did not support the idea of an African-American colony in Africa. Still, the ACS had powerful support and its colonization project gained momentum." - https://history.state.gov/milestones/1830-1860/liberia

"Tolson:

""Liberia?
No side-show barker's bioaccident" - Libretto for the Republic of Liberia - p 159

"- instead of the more commonly used 'freak'. Tolson seems to be pointing out that Liberia's unusual status as a republic originally populated by former slaves wasn't happenstance or haphazard - instead it served conscious purposes both for the freemen of African ancestry & for the somewhat more dubiously motivated power-mongers in the American ruling elites.

""Solomon in all his glory had no Oxford,
Alfred the Great no University of Sankoré:
Footloose professors, chimney sweeps of the skull,
From Europe and Asia; youths, souls in one skin,
Under white scholars like El-Akit, under
Black humanists like Bagayogo, Karibu wee!

""The Good Gray Bard in Timbuktu chanted:
"Europe is an empty python hiding in the grass!"

""Lia! Lia! The river Wagadu, the river Bagana,
Became dusty metaphors where white ants ate canoes,
And the locust Portuguese raped the maiden crops,
And the sirocco Spaniard razed the city-states,
And the leopard Saracen bolted his scimitar into
The jugular vein of Timbuktu. Dieu seul est grand!" - p 162, lines 79-92" - https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/389462-tolson

Back to Liberia, the planet, in Chandler's The Anarch Lords:

"Suffice it to say that the original colonists, the idealistic Anarchists, after a bad start during which their settlement almost perished, became devotees of the goddess Laura Norder . . ." (I'd better laugh, thought Grimes, to keep the old bastard in a good mood.) "Their numbers increased and eventually they were able to exercise control over their environment. There was a resurgence of Anarchism and armed revolt against the authorities. The president—he was more of a dictator, actually—appealed for help to the Federation. After the mess had been more or less cleaned up it was decided that the Liberians would be far happier if governed by an outsider, somebody whom everybody, right, left and center, could hate." - p 9

It's funny, I haven't personally been accused of being an 'idealist' in a long time. Have I become accepted as a 'realist' or has that old criticism of anyone who wants to change things in a way that they consider to be more fair & more liberating become obsolete itself? Whatever the case, reading mention of "idealistic Anarchists" has a familiar feel to it.

If there is such a thing as 'regular readers of my reviews', the next quoted passage will evoke what SF writer whose work I like?:

"["]The real ruler of the planet is not the governor, or the president, but the commanding officer of the peace-keeping force, Colonel Bardon, Terran Army. He's got the president eating out of his hand."

""And the governor?"

""The last governor—your predecessor?—met with an accident. It seems that he tried to put a stop to many of the abuses.["]" - p 10

[Sound of honking buzzer]: That's right, folks, our old favorite, Ron Goulart!

Australian references figure prominently: "Grimes watched Sister Sue lift off from Port Woomera." (p 12) My friend & collaborator etta cetera & I made a movie partially shot at the Woomera dump in 2000: "The Lab-Rats Explain Their Veggie-Oil Powered Van" ( https://youtu.be/X0RsOO9W0hs ). Woomera is a US military base in the outback. People drive on the right side of the road there instead of the normal left side of the road in the rest of AUS. This is apparently b/c the US military personnel are too stupid to be able to deal w/ deviating from their norm. Woomera is also where a refugee camp was. If you were there you wdn't be saying "he would fly to Alice Springs to spend a few days with his parents before leaving for Liberia." (p 13)

"Sons of Terra, strong and free came to its blaring conclusion. Thankfully Grimes relaxed, put his hat back on his head. Then there was a roll of drums, followed by more music—Liberia's sons, let us rejoice . . . He whipped off his hat, came to attention. That anthem was over at last and he took a step towards the edge of the platform—and again froze. This time it was Waltzing Matilda." - p 35

Check out Australia-based music scholar Warren Burt's take on "Waltzing Matilda" here: https://youtu.be/TiCYlcBm5nM?t=1h58m7s .

"Then there were more Australian artists. There was Nolan, with his weirdly compelling perpetuation of a myth, the giant in his fantastic armor astride a horse that could have been borrowed (or stolen!) from Don Quixote. A myth? But there had been a Ned Kelly, whose name and fame had survived while those of far worthier citizens were long forgotten. And if the cards had fallen only a little differently at Glenrowan what might have happened? The course of Australian history, of Terran history, even, could have changed." - p 42

Who these "far worthier citizens" were I'd like to know. Ned Kelly is of course a bushranger, an outlaw of similar anti-authoritarian spirit to the US's James Gang (the latter of whose Robin Hood history is disputed) insofar as the Kelly Gang fought against british discrimination against the Irish & robbed banks & killed police. Kelly is such a folk hero that even Australia's government website has a somewhat favorable entry about him:

"The bushranger Ned Kelly is one of Australia's greatest folk heroes. He has been memorialised by painters, writers, musicians and filmmakers alike. More books, songs and websites have been written about Ned Kelly and the Kelly Gang than any other group of Australian historical figures.

"Bushranging was said to have ended with the shooting of the Kelly Gang in 1880 at Glenrowan, Victoria, made possible by the introduction of the Felons Apprehension Act 1865 (NSW) which allowed outlawed bushrangers to be shot, rather than arrested and sent to trial.

"Irish rebels and wild colonial boys

"Before the end of transportation in 1840, more than 50,000 Irish 'rebels' were exiled to Australia. Their mistrust of British authority came with them, along with their vehement independence as Catholics, specifically excluded from holding public office or government positions until after 1900. It has been argued that this independence of the Irish contributed to the showdown with Ned Kelly and the police at Glenrowan in 1880.

"Many of the transported convicts were also agitators, machine breakers, political activists and union organisers. These included the Scottish lawyer Thomas Muir, transported in 1794 for handing out copies of Tom Paine's The Rights of Man."

[..]

"The Australian film industry produced what was probably the world's first full-length feature film in 1906. The film was the Tait Brothers' production The Story of the Kelly Gang . It was a success in both Australian and British theatres, and it was also the beginning of a genre of bushranger stories."

[..]

"While the Australian public took a liking to bushranger stories, the New South Wales police department did not. The production of films about bushrangers was banned in 1912. The Kelly story, however, outlasted the ban and has been re-filmed a number of times since.

"Other well known films about Ned Kelly include: Ned Kelly (1970) starring English rock singer Mick Jagger as Ned; the Trial of Ned Kelly (1977) starring John Waters and Gerard Kennedy; the 1980 mini-series The Last Outlaw starring John Jarratt, Steve Bisley and Sigrid Thornton; and the 2003 Gregor Jordan directed Ned Kelly which starred Heath Ledger."

I've read that some people didn't like the 1977 movie b/c a short Englishman, Mick Jagger, was cast as the large Irishman, Kelly. Chandler went on to write a novel featuring Kelly: "In his novel Kelly Country (1984) Chandler explored an alternate history, in which the bushranger Ned Kelly was not captured and hanged, but led a rebellion, ultimately becoming the president of an Australian republic which degenerated into a hereditary dictatorship." ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A._Bertram_Chandler )

"The face was olive-skinned, hawklike. Native-born, he thought. The original colonists—those romantic Anarchists—had been largely of Latin-American stock.

""Could be?" he asked.

""That is the opinion of some of us, Your Excellency." And we've heard of you, of course. You're something of an Anarchist yourself . . ."

""Mphm?"

""I mean. . . . You're not the usual Survey Service stuffed shirt."" - p 30

That was a pleasant & human enuf exchange now wasn't it?

"Don't worry about Pedro and Miguel, sir. They're like me, members of the OAP, the Original Anarchist Party. We're allowed by our gracious President to blow off steam as long as we don't do anything. . . . " - p 31

& then, of course, there're the DRUGS that're used by the POSERS-THAT-BE to insure that people's destructive energies are turned inward:

"There are habit-forming drugs, like Dassan dreamsticks. . . ."

""They're illegal," said Grimes, "on all federated worlds."

"The pilot laughed harshly. "Of course they are. But that doesn't worry Bardon's Bullies."" - p 32

Having spent almost 2 decades of my life in inner city BalTimOre where as many as 10% of the population were reputed to be heroin addicts & where the attendant problems of misery were on abundant display this sort of thing as displayed in literature, either fiction or non-fiction, always grabs my attn. I'm reminded of another recent SF bk I read, Rachel Pollack's Golden Vanity ( https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1578911372 ), in my review of wch I wrote:

""On either side of the narrow corridor the metal doors leaked solitary noises from the cubicles. Most of the Workers spent their planet hours dancing Ghost, a practice the Gardener detested. When he could he spent his time in woods or at least parks, even places like the blue moss caves on Hrrhrrhrrhrru, anywhere growing. On so many of the worlds, however, the companies had sliced every tree and scrub fern within a hundred dots of port, so where else could you go but the Refuge?" - p 91

"- "dancing Ghost" meaning getting high on a particular drug of that name. I can easily imagine the more feeble-minded in our current society "dancing Ghost" by being couch potatoes rather than daring to get their shoes muddy."

Whether it's "Dassan dreamsticks" or "dancing Ghost" it all hearkens back to heroin wch leads me to one of my all-time most recommended bks: The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia by Alfred W. McCoy. Most governments fund the manufacture & sales of illegal drugs to enable profiteering to support further illegal activities AND to help suppress large populations. McCoy backs this assertion in highly satisfactory detail.

The imagining of a planet populated by anarchists that's turned into an oppressive state full of hero-worship trappings is bound to amuse me:

See the full review here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/442383-taking-the-lords ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
2 sur 2
aucune critique | ajouter une critique

» Ajouter d'autres auteur(e)s (2 possibles)

Nom de l'auteurRôleType d'auteurŒuvre ?Statut
Chandler, A. Bertramauteur principaltoutes les éditionsconfirmé
Chandler, A. BertramPréfaceauteur principalquelques éditionsconfirmé
Hohlbein, Wolfgang E.Traducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Petillo, BobArtiste de la couvertureauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Terrahe, SybilleNachrufauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Winkler, DieterTraducteurauteur secondairequelques éditionsconfirmé
Vous devez vous identifier pour modifier le Partage des connaissances.
Pour plus d'aide, voir la page Aide sur le Partage des connaissances [en anglais].
Titre canonique
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Titre original
Titres alternatifs
Date de première publication
Personnes ou personnages
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Lieux importants
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Évènements importants
Films connexes
Épigraphe
Dédicace
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances anglais. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
For Vice-Admiral William Bligh R.N., one-time commanding Officer of the H.M.S, Bounty, one-time Governor of New South Wales, with belated apologies for the participation of an ancestral Grimes in the Rum Rebellion of 1808 A.D.
Premiers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
»Sie kommen noch mal mit einem blauen Auge davon, Grimes«, sagte Konteradmiral Damien.
Citations
Derniers mots
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
(Cliquez pour voir. Attention : peut vendre la mèche.)
Notice de désambigüisation
Directeur de publication
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
Courtes éloges de critiques
Langue d'origine
Informations provenant du Partage des connaissances allemand. Modifiez pour passer à votre langue.
DDC/MDS canonique
LCC canonique

Références à cette œuvre sur des ressources externes.

Wikipédia en anglais

Aucun

John Grimes' career as a space pirate has ended. Now he faces his toughest assignment yet. He has been made governor of the anarchists' own planet. His first task is to stay alive--with a whole world plotting his murder

Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque

Description du livre
Résumé sous forme de haïku

Discussion en cours

Aucun

Couvertures populaires

Vos raccourcis

Évaluation

Moyenne: (3.44)
0.5
1
1.5
2
2.5 1
3 4
3.5 1
4
4.5 1
5 1

Est-ce vous ?

Devenez un(e) auteur LibraryThing.

 

À propos | Contact | LibraryThing.com | Respect de la vie privée et règles d'utilisation | Aide/FAQ | Blog | Boutique | APIs | TinyCat | Bibliothèques historiques | Critiques en avant-première | Partage des connaissances | 203,186,215 livres! | Barre supérieure: Toujours visible