Well, in 1945, the US government DID want to destroy Tokyo. Creating a giant amphibian to handle the task probably wasn't what Truman and the Manhattan Project scientists originally intended, but whatever works....
Ain't science grand!
186: Dude, that book came out TWENTY YEARS AGO. Get over it!
More seriously, Tim Harper is generally (a) pro-spaceflight and (b) reasonably militaristic. He WOULDN'T have had a favorable impression of JImmy Carter.
If it makes you happier, I'll go so far as to say I personally give Carter credit for good intentions, if not always for performance. But it was Tim Harper's story I was telling, not mine.
Tom Whitmore -- God, how I hate it when a beautiful theory is ruined by ugly facts!
TomB: the Flandry books started as "original novels" in the old Ace double-novel days; they were very obviously science fictional pastiches of the James Bond novels, which were becoming wildly popular during the early 1960's.
Even as a not-very-critical teenager, the early Flandry stuff struck me as pretty minor work, but Anderson was a prolific writer of fairly serious stuff. I don't think he wrote them simply for easy money, in other words; I think he wanted to amuse his readers with something light and frivolous, and Ace gave him the opportunity.
Time passed, the Flandry series mounted up, Anderson and all the rest of us aged, the USA itself aged and took on tarnish, our foreign adventures were not all successful, our domestic leaders were not without flaw.
The times were sobering, I'm trying to suggest, and Anderson was shaped by them. And when the time came to generate some backstory and weld together a rather patchy series of tales, Anderson became more serious, Flandry became more serious, the governing metaphor switched from Cold War enthusiasm to Fall of the Roman Empire stoicism. I'm fairly certain this was deliberate; I will not guess at a motive.
My 2 cents.
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