In an awesome contest? For context, Pirius Blue is the first human to capture a Xeelee Nightfighter, he was the one who fired the shot that scared the Xeelee out of the Milky Way, and when caught in the grip of a black hole with a malfunctioning space suit forced the black hole to kill him by adjusting his suit on the fly. In other words, he is the one responsible, through victory, of the Interim Coalition of Governance's ultimate collapse after 20,000 years of rule. Who can match, or exceed, his awesomeness?
Well, he didn't scare the Xeelee out of the Milky Way, particularly. The Xeelee didn't want to take the risk that, through rampant human ignorance, accidentally waking up one of the things that created the Universe that was living in the Prime Radiant. It's possible that Pirius may have accidentally woken up something that might have slapped the snooze button on the Universe. Also, he didn't really bring about the end of the Coalition. They'd continue to pointlessly squander countless trillions upon trillions of human lives attempting to assault Bolder's Ring, remember, until the Xeelee decided to slap humanities shit for being too annoying a fly. I think one of the short stories in Vacuum Diagrams had the space near parts of the Ring literally filled with the ruins of millions of Grand Assaults that humanity pointlessly attempting in order to destroy the Ring, every single one of them ending in failure, including one assault that included the Earth's own moon. Pirius was an extremely tiny part of humanity's endless cycle of futility that was slightly less futile than 99% of the rest of it. That's not very awesome at all.
Also speaking of 40k. The God Emperor of man. The strongest psychic human being in the Galaxy. He single handily united humanity after a good chunk of the species became portals to hell, and mutated into monsters, and was enslaved by aliens. He made super soldiers armed with mini-rockets, chain-saw swords, and power armor. He was armed with a claw and a FLAMING SWORD! and wore golden armor. He made 20 human demi-gods from his own genes to lead said soldiers. And depending on the source, almost fucked over the chaos gods. And once he lost his children, he didn't cry like a bitch, he went and found them, he didn't care that they were on separate points in the galaxy, he either brought everyone under his rule, or destroyed them under nuclear/plasma fire. When one of his sons disappointed him, he blew up his city, and told him to get over it and fight better. With his (almost) dying breath, he shot a beam of psychic energy as strong as a fuck super nova at his killer, avenging himself.
I don't think that was the same Coalition. I believe the Coalition that Pirius Blue was a part of collapsed a couple thousand years later while the Bolder Ring assaults happened much much later. I only recently read the short story you speak of, its called The Tyranny of Heaven.
Oh him? He was just a young Japanese businessman in Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945. Burned and baffled in the aftermath, he then went home... to Nagasaki. Then when he was quite certain America was done nuking him, he decided he'd live another sixty-five years to drive home the point.
Yeah, I like to bring Mr. Tsutomu Yamaguchi out for special occasions like this. Also for when we're ridiculing the practice of always using high end calcs, since it's just fun to say "Predators are fuckin' pussies... Some humans have taken TWO nukes and survived and Preds regularly go down to just one!"
Indeed, it is not the same coalition, the Coalition Pirius Blue was part of splintered into a thousand pieces about a hundred years after the end of the Xeelee war.
I'm not sure it did collapse. Nilis believed it would without the Xeelee to fight, but humanity more or less continuously kept attempting to attack the Xeelee, particularly Bolder's Ring, until they were put in the penalty box. Pirius' victory, which it turned out wasn't a victory but humanity doing something sufficiently stupid that the Xeelee decided to pick up rather than let them keep trying it, accomplished nothing in the end. It was just a tiny bit less futile than most things humanity was up to since the Assimilation.
No, in the timeline in Resplendent it shows that the Coalition splintered into a million squabbling successor states about a hundred years after the Xeelee left. The next human attack on the Xeelee wouldn't happen for a very long time afterwards.
Yep, there is a short story in Resplendent about a woman holding a ship hostage with a monopole bomb demanding to see her daughter who was sent into the supermassive blackhole. In that short story they mention the fall of the Coalition and rise of the warlords.
That Japanese guy wins...two nukes, can any of the people that you mentioned survive two nukes in a row? (Note, that since I doubt he was next to the nukes, and he was just a normal man, the people you mentioned must stand closer to the nukes when they go off, due to being not even close to normal.)
Father; invented fire, the weapon, ranged weapons, exogamy, mysticism and art. Killed and eaten by his sons before he came up with anything really dangerous. From 'What we did to Father' by Roy Lewis
