The Ashanti I think. As I recall they were stateless (?) but would rapidly
congregate in support of a citizen, or to avenge the citizen, if such were
the case.
I may be wrong about the statelessness of the phyle. There was also the
distributed nation who kidnap one of the characters, which strikes me as
being very close to an ideal nation, if you feel you need to belong to some
sort of extended social grouping for defense or other purposes.
> I don't recall what phyle is short for, if I remember I'll let you
> know.
My brother is in a mediaeval re-enactment group, doing viking stuff
(Varangian Guard stuff, actually, but anyways), and they train in "files",
a "file" being (I think) seven men and a "file" leader. It's seven or eight
or so.
Curious. I thought it might be a biological term, or some sort of
graeco-latin phrase.
> If you recall from the book our skull gun packing friend Bud
> assaulted a member of the Ashanti (who were a tribe and not just a
> phyle) as a result of which a large team of Ashanti flew in and
> searched out the perpetrator, and placed him under "personnel
> arrest". They immediately sought out the proper authorities and you
> recall the rest. (no spoiler here) This is one possibility.
aha! Yes. But did they have an actual state? I seem to recall that they
were more of a mobile distributed mutual self-defense league, or federation
of independent individuals.
> Nicely done I might add.
It set off all sorts of idea-storms in my head, that book. Aside from being
a fairly good author, he excels in coming up with new ideas as well as
making established ideas seem very familiar and commonplace, which made the
whole book hang together as a very believable near-future story.
Dwayne.
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dwayne
ddraig@pobox.com
return....to.....the.....source http://pobox.com/~ddraig
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