Rakenan, I see that this is your First Post.
Welcome to David Weber's Forum!
The Arcanan advantages you cite are, as you say,
long-term. We do not know how long a story-arc DW
(David Weber) originally intended. Two of his
universes (Honorverse and Safehold) have arcs
measured in centuries. The others he has kept short,
deliberately, for lack of writing time.
As you say next, assumptions are dangerous.
It is particularly dangerous to guess how an author
means to guide his plot. There are so many posibilites!
We readers can see how a story might go, how it Ought
to go, and then the author overlooks what is obvious
to us, and does something entirely different!
Weber is particularly tricky in these matters.
About the likelyhood of Sharona exploding "into an
apocalyptic civil war ..." at the particular moment
that book 2 ended, the Emperor of Uromathia (= China)
was plotting just such a thing.
Arcana, OTOH, is aware of the danger. We do not know
what measures they take to guard against it, but we
do know that the Mythalian conspirators find it
necesssary to be Very Very Sneaky.
But it may be years before the story advances further,
because Linda Evans is reported to be in poor health,
and DW is attending to other stories. (:(
The more fans this series has, the more likely it is
to resume. You are Very Much Welcome Here, Rakenan!
Howard True Map-addict
rakenan wrote:Arcana has several advantages that Sharona cannot really copy, and the strategic depth to put them into practice. Notably, I'm pretty sure that Mythala has been at least working on mapping human genetics to create super-mages, or possibly purge the mage genome from non-Mythalans with a disease.
Assuming they fail to take over (and we know what assume means), the practical expertise they gain will be priceless in the war against Sharona - because the Sharonan mental gifts are also genetic, so potentially Arcana can add them to their arsenal relatively quickly if and when the taboo against human genetic engineering is broken by Mythala.
The second advantage is that Arcana can in theory learn to copy all the technology of Sharona except the psychic powers. Sharona can learn to *USE* Arcanan spellware, but cannot make it, because they lack mages and the ability to alter genetics to gain mages.
As things stand, however, Sharona has almost all of the advantages except size. They have better communication, they are less likely to explode into an apocalyptic civil war at any moment, and their weapons do not appear to have trivially easy countermeasures. They also seem less prone to grossly underestimate their foes because they are doctrinaire fanatics whose core belief is in their own supremacy, which is a major problem for every area of Arcana influenced by Mythala.