Last modified: 2007-01-20 by marc pasquin
Keywords: book | novel | mysterium | consolidated republic |
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Mysterium by Robert Charles Wilson. The novel involves a
small Michigan town that is transported to an alternate Earth by a
physics experiment performed at an adjacent government laboratory. The
alternate world is quite interesting, the point of divergence being
that the Roman Empire had managed to hold out for another few
hundred years, and in the meantime coopted a Gnostic Christianity into
its civic religion, with mixed results.
Eugene Ipavec, 22 August 2006
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The Consolidated Republic is under the sway of a rather vicious clericalist dictatorship, seemigly about midway between Cromwell and Hitler. Its flag is described on page 67 as being:
blue with white bars and a red star in the middle.The number of bars is not given; from context, either two or fifteen would be probable: Two for the consolidation of French and English colonies from which the state had arisen; fifteen for the original number of provinces. In the latter case however I suspect the author would have likelier used the word "stripe."
For me to have something being described in term of
bands (or bars, or stripes) and field means that there
should be a clear way to distinguish between the 2
elements. Something as Eugene has done would be, to
me, "5 bands in alternating colours", not a "plain
field defaced with 2 bands in another colour".
A design like the flag of Israel
would fit the bill as would one like South-Vietnam
where the bands (on my image, 3 for the Holy Trinity ) were bunched up
near the center.
Its also possible considering the nature of the regime
that "bars" could be meant as an alusion by the writer
to the represive prison-like environment and so, vertical bars.
Marc Pasquin, 28 October 2006
