Mark <-- redeacted --> writes:

>      Remember, that story was set centuries later.  Given enough time, even
>      the gravest wounds heal and people are more interested in having had
>      ancestors that have some clim to fame than in having ancestors who had
>      a claim to goodness.

Maybe so.  I hadn't thought about it that way.  (I guess I was even surprised
to see the Governor-General's dog named Stalin.  Interesting that Piper wrote
it such that Hitler was the admired ancestor and "Uncle Joe" was a dog.)

>      How many people would be delighted to learn that they'd had a famous
>      pirate in their ancestry?  Who cares today if their ancestors fought
>      for Charles or for the Roundheads?  Would you be embarassed to learn
>      the Atilla the Hun was your 45-times-removed great grandfather?  Louis
>      XIV?  Peter the Great?

Again, good points.  Still, Hitler?  Do you *really* think he'll be seen as
"just another conqueror" in half a millennium?

>      Whatever it says about Piper's politics, it *was* a very realistic
>      glimpse of how people will be behaving 400 years from now.

I have to admit, you may be right--at least taking into account that a lot of
the way we've come to look at the Holocaust now is quite different from how it
was viewed at the time Beam was writing *Uller*.

David Johnson                        Net: -- redeacted --
Rockville, Maryland, North America   Web: http://gwis2.circ.gwu.edu/~david
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"Keep a government poor and weak and it's your servant; let it get rich
and powerful and it's your master."  -Col. A.J. Hickock (H. Beam Piper)
                                     *Lone Star Planet*