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DUMB_GODS_SPEAK
December 3, 2017
But not very clearly.
"The Dumb Gods Speak",
by E. Phillips Oppenheim.
A novel written between the two In an early demo, they put the
world wars, a utopian novel of a control systems of a naval ship
sort. The premise is someone has out-of-action.
invented some powerful technologies
that can completely neutralize These technologies have been used
modern armament. The technology is seriously just once (about ten
kept secret, nominally under the years before the story proper
control of some Very Important begins) to destroy the Japanese
People, the Council of Seven which fleet to prevent them from trying
includes such personages as the Vice to conquer the Phillipines.
President of the United States.
Something I've noted
When the novel proper is under way, before: in retrospect,
there is a conspiracy of two people, many people harp on how
including the son of the inventor of tremendously suprising
the tech, who appears to be the only the Japanese attack on
person who really understands it. The Perl Harbor was. It
other person is a Chinese nobleman who would not have been if
is massing the chinese armies to they'd read some more
essentially conquer the world with the trashy fiction, where
aid of the super-tech. there was a general
expectation of war with
The goal is to get the world under Japan.
military hegemony of a single force
that can impose peace. Pax Technica.
Why anyone would *trust* these two
guys for any length of time
is completely unstated.
Logically the C7 people should
know something about what's up,
and after all, the world has
*seen* this tech used to destroy
the Japanese fleet.
Similarly, there's no good reason
for these two guys to trust each
other: the Chinese guy's mental There's only one point on
processes are very strange from the which they *almost* have a
viewpoint of the American guy. falling out: there's a
woman who works for them
(as secretary/office
manager) who is technically
So, this is a massively derranged a Russian princess. The
work, shot through with variations Chinese guy has a scheme to
of the Philospher King fallacy; make her the Empress of
a grossly optimistic fantasy Russia (throwing out those
of a scenario to obviate a repeat nasty commies, you know).
of World War I.... She's actually uninterested
in this job, and in fact
This is the kind of naive scenario would much rather get-it-on
people sometimes attribute to with the American tech
H.G. Wells, though to my knowledge genius.
he's never come up with anything
this dumb. The Chinese fellow is
rather miffed, and can't
comprehend why they don't
see the importance of her
role in his brilliant
But one might point to The scheme.
Airmen keeping the warlords
under control with their
sleeping gas bombs, from the
film "Things to Come".
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