Importance
While the Qax play a pivotal role only in one book (Timelike Infinity) their occupation creates the xenophobic government that led the human conquest of the galaxy, and they are almost certainly the main cause of the loss of most of the human offshoots that survived the last human/Xeelee war. They are not responsible for the loss of the Ring but their attack does ensure that the humans who escape the Xeelee prison are able to leave the universe unmolested by the photino birds.
It could be argued that their aggressive policy of cultural extirpation during their period of enslavement is what ultimately led to Man's subsequent expansion and outright hostility towards other aliens. By adopting and subverting many Qax policies, Man became a collectivist society with little to no individuality left - there was only the goal of domination, to which everyone subscribed from an early age. In that regard, the Qax are in many ways ultimately responsible for the Assimilation (including the extermination of the Silver Ghosts) and the eventual war with the Xeelee.
Read more about this topic: Qax (species)
Famous quotes containing the word importance:
“The importance of a lost romantic vision should not be underestimated. In such a vision is power as well as joy. In it is meaning. Life is flat, barren, zestless, if one can find one’s lost vision nowhere.”
—Sarah Patton Boyle, U.S. civil rights activist and author. The Desegregated Heart, part 1, ch. 19 (1962)
“A man’s personal defects will commonly have with the rest of the world precisely that importance which they have to himself. If he makes light of them, so will other men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“More than ten million women march to work every morning side by side with the men. Steadily the importance of women is gaining not only in the routine tasks of industry but in executive responsibility. I include also the woman who stays at home as the guardian of the welfare of the family. She is a partner in the job and wages. Women constitute a part of our industrial achievement.”
—Herbert Hoover (1874–1964)