Planets of The Hainish Cycle - Faraday

Faraday

Faraday has a prominent place in Rocannon's World; it is a young planet which embarks on a career of interstellar war and conquest and constructs a secret base on the backward world where the book takes place, from which destructive ships could be launched to numerous targets while the League spends its force on subduing their home world. The planet being named for a famous Earth physicist evidently indicates that it was originally discovered and named by Terrans, who introduced its inhabitants to interstellar civilization (the Faradayans are specifically mentioned as having learned chess-playing from Terrans). Faraday seems loosely modeled on Imperial Japan - i.e., a relative late-comer to an existing civilization, which quickly takes up new technologies, builds up aggressive armed forces in order to carve out a bigger place for itself in that established civilization, oppresses weaker cultures and peoples which it encounters, and makes use of fanatic pilots ready to embark on suicide missions. The act of Rocannon at the end of the book results in the destruction of their secret base; Faraday's aggressive designs are evidently checked (or destroyed, as it is mentioned in Rocannon's World that the League is attacking the planet itself), and the planet is not heard of again in later books.