In article <
7a963afc-37ca-479e-8388-2ac35f4edcf9n@googlegroups.com>,
Robert Carnegie <
rja.carnegie@excite.com> wrote:
On Saturday 9 December 2023 at 18:38:36 UTC, bozo de niro wrote:
of a religious prophet or messiah who didn't know he was one?
Or the government. There's Captain John Geary in
Jack Campbell's "The Lost Fleet" science fiction
novels, whose space warship is destroyed in a
surprise attack by the Syndicate Worlds in a time
of peace. A century of warfare, he's awoken from
frozen sleep and is identified as the legendary
defender and propaganda figure "Black Jack Geary".
Due to casualties, he's also the senior captain -
in age - of the Alliance Fleet, nearly all of which
has encountered another disastrous Syndicate
ambush, so he can take command, and is asked to.
He isn't a religious leader, but he does have ideas
about how to fight space war which are not how
either side has been doing things lately. Returning
from apparently being dead does make religious
people in this society speculate about how his
reappearance came about, and there's also a lot
of support for him to take over the government
of the Alliance, but he absolutely does not want
to do that.
Even Geary's wife, a rather sober type herself half believes
he was "sent". Geary himself is sincerely religious (in a low-key
way) and absolutely does not.
_The World of Null-A_, also technically science
fiction, offers a candidate of Gilbert Gosseyn,
a man with false memories and an affinity for the
philosophy of General Semantics.
Quite a number of van Vogt's characters have god-like powers,
but I think only Ptath went down that road.
--
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What's not in Columbia anymore..
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