Even when I try to ignore the psychological and social oddities of space opera aristocracies, I get hung up on the historical ones. I don't have to accept the entire, what?, Weberian thesis that Northern European Protestantism was the necessary and sufficient matrix for technological takeoff to be puzzled by ancient cultures surviving massive technological change. It should be more destabilizing. The States has scarcely kept its plutocracy through three hundred years on one planet; it doesn't seem very likely that Iron Age social structures would last through half a millennium of interstellar colonization.
On the other hand, the Japan-and-Méxica background is a nice change from eternal England, and is even just, barely, plausible, as Samurai William suggests. For all I know Harlan altered large chunks of it as though they had experienced something as complicated as Protestantism, universal suffrage, and the rise of the technocratic middle class. Doesn't sound like it, much. Nor was there room, I admit; it's a thick brisk book.
In small details, it's straightforward and suspends disbelief nicely. The archaeologists sent to the wrecked planet of the elder races are perpetually concerned with boots, publication, warm hats, censorship, fuel-line repairs, military intervention, the social problems of crushes in camp, and nanotech chilblains. (Suspension of disbelief w.r.t. the main outlines is a matter of taste.) I think the social interactions are well-done, especially when Harlan just describes them without giving us explanatory flashbacks and social commentary.
ISBN: 0-765-34113-1
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