"S. M. Stirling - Draka 05 - Drakas!" - читать интересную книгу автора (Stirling S. M)

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INTRODUCTION
To coin a phrase, the 20thcentury has been the best of times, and the worst of times; the century when
smallpox was abolished and the century when a new word, "genocide," entered the lexicon of politics. It
started with the serene confidence of the Edwardian Enlightenment at the end of a century free of great
international wars, when reason and progress seemed to be rolling forward on a broad invincible front.

Then it took a wrong turning in the slaughters of Passchendale and Verdun, descended into the abyss of
Stalingrad, Nanking, Buchenwald and the Gulag. Even the motor of progress, science, turned out to have
some very nasty exhaust. For fifty years we hovered on the brink of annihilation, forced to threaten the
survival of civilization, if not humanity, to hold totalitarianism in check.

And then, all at once, things got better . . .

Anyone who studies history eventually runs across a little jingle that goes:

For want of a nail, the shoe was lost;
For want of a shoe, the horse was lost;
For want of a horse, the message was lost;
For want of the message, the battle was lost;
For want of the battle, the kingdom was lostтАФ
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail!
 What's more, you come to appreciate the essential truth of it. There are broad, impersonal forces at
work in history; if Christopher Columbus had died as a childтАФmost children did, in his ageтАФsomeone
else would have discovered the Atlantic crossing soon enough. Basque fishermen may well have crossed
to Newfoundland before him; an English expedition set out to America a few years after; the Portugese
blundered into Brazil on their way to India (it makes sense, in sailing-ship terms) a few years after that.

The knowledge was there, and the ships, and the civilization that produced them, a strong hungry people
ready to burst out upon the world. And so we live in the world the West Europeans made, built on
foundations laid by the empires of sailing ships and muskets.

But oh, how the details would be different if it had not been Columbus, but another man a few years
later! And how those changes might have rippled on, growing through the years.