Retro Review - "We Purchased People" (1974) by Frederik Pohl (*MAJOR SPOILERS*)

"Retro Review of

'We Purchased People' (1974)

by Frederik Pohl,"

(c) 2012

by Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction: 

Frederik Pohl (b. 1919) is a grand master of science fiction, most famous for his novel (co-written with C. M. Kornbluth) The Space Merchants (1952), which was one of the first American science fictional examples of a corporate-dominated future society; and his "Gateway" stories about humans exploring the relic interstellar travel system left by the vanshed Heechee.  This is a short but powerful story about a man who has been enslaved to aliens.


Synopsis:

Not so far in the future -- perhaps some time in the early 21st century --  several races of interstellar aliens have made contact with Earth by tachyonic radio, and rather than send starships or build android agents, have instead adapted a naturally-occurring resource to their ends:  human beings.  And most of the human race doesn't mind this, for the aliens have a lot of knowledge to offer in trade.

... the star people had established fast radio contact with the people of Earth, and ... in order to conduct their business on Earth, they had purchased the bodies of certain convicted criminals, installing in them tachyon fast-radio tranceivers.

The aliens control and communicate with these "purchased people" through the FTL links, and use them to carry out various tasks:  mostly, diplomacy and the purchase of objects interesting to the aliens for their own not-always-comprehensible reasons.

Art objects they admired and purchased.  Certain rare kinds of plants and flowers they purchased and had frozen at liquid-helium temperatures.  Certain kinds of utilitarian objects they purchased.  Every few months, another rocket roared up ... and another cargo headed for the Groombridge star, on its twelve-thousand-year voyage ...

Or longer, or shorter, depending on the particular group of aliens.  As for the economics:

Each rocket cost at least $10 million.  The going rate for a healthy male paranoid capable of three or more decades of useful work was in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they bought they by the dozen.

Wayne Golden, a serial killer who murdered several young women out of obscure and foul impulses

I never molested any of them sexually, you know.  I mean in some ways I'm still kind of a virgin.  That wasn't what I wanted, I just wanted to see them die.  When they asked me at the pre-trial hearing if I knew the difference between right and wrong I didn't know how to answer them.  I knew what I did was wrong for them.  But it wasn't wrong for me; it was what I wanted.

is one such purchased person.  As with all of these slaves, they've installed his tachylink behind an oval gold plate in his head.  Everyone who sees him knows what he is, despises him for his status and for the crimes he must have committed to be sold to the aliens, and knows his economic importance.

Most of the time, Wayne runs errands for the Groombridge aliens.  The aliens can control him through his implant, either directly or by sending him pain when he does something they don't like, or fails to do something they desire.  They can read his thoughts, and they send him pain if he thinks something they sufficiently dislike:  mostly regarding his past murderous actions.  Self-maintenance (eating, sleeping, hygiene) must be performed in moments of time snatched between these errands.

Every now and then, at unpredictable intervals, they give him some time off.  During these periods, he can do what he wants, as long as it's neither self- or other-destructive.  Wayne greatly values these times, as one might imagine.

Improbably, Wayne has fallen in love with another purchased person, Carolyn, whom he has met on assignement.  She is owned by the same group of aliens, which means that they can hope for some vacation at the same time, but so far they have never been able to do more than snatch minutes here and there for conversation.

Then, Wayne is given an indefinite leave, and he is able to meet Carolyn.  They go to a hotel.  She tells him that this has been arranged by the Groombridge aliens, who would be interested in observing them having sex through the link.  This repulses Wayne, but then (as he perceives) the aliens take him over through the link and

************SPOILER SPACE*************
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
*
make him kill Carolyn.

Or at least he thinks that the aliens made him do it.

But then, switching to the alien POV, we learn that actually

It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself.  The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm -- the desruction of the sexual partner -- may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures.  Fufther experiments will be made with differing procedures and other sexual partners in the near future.  Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.

Analysis:

It's not that the alien control made Wayne kill Carolyn.  It's that the alien control was what was preventing Wayne from killing Carolyn (and possibly other people) as he did before:  when it was withdrawn for a sufficiently long period  of time, and he was presented with a sexual opportunity, Wayne reverted to his normal state of being a sexually-motivated serial killer.

Wayne, of course, didn't see it that way.  He blamed it on the aliens:  not in the sense in which it really was their fault (they'd set up the encounter as an experiment) but in the delusion that they had taken him over when he murdered Carolyn.  In fact it was Wayne's own sick and evil nature which was directly responsible for the killing:  he could not handle the reality of sexual attraction to a woman.

In a way this is analogous to the Earth's selling of slaves to the aliens.  It is true that the aliens offer knowlege for large amounts of financial credit, and offer the credit thus gained for their living drones.  But the transaction is voluntary on our part:  it is our desire for easy knowledge, and the lack of value we place on the lives of the severely and violently insane, which provides people for purchase.

There is of course an obvious analogy here with the West African slave trade.  The Europeans came bearing items relatively cheap for Europe to manufacture, because of Europe's slightly more advanced technology (cloths from mechanically-better looms, liquors from more advanced chemical processes, and so on) and were able to exchange these to native potentates (usually through Arab middlemen, though this is digression) in return for human beings who for whatever reason the native rulers no longer valued (they were often previous slaves, prisoners of war, or criminals).  Without this cooperation from the natives, the slave trade would have been difficult, or perhaps impossible.

The story is chilling on multiple levels.  On the most obvious level, it is horrifying because it is being told mostly form the POV of one of the "purchased people," and we get to see just how unpleasant it can be.  For instance, at one point, he is forced to soil himself in front of a whole international conference because the aliens forget he needs to go to the bathroom -- this incident is in some ways more painful to read than the ones where the aliens outright make him do things, because while few of us have been mind-controlled by aliens, all of us have at one point or another at least come close to losing excretory control in public.

On the next level, it is horrifying because Wayne Golden is a rather disgusting person.  He's no undeserving victim, he really did kill a bunch of innocent young women for the sake of gratifying his own depraved  sexual impulses, and one of the questions raised by this story is "Does he deserve this?" 

His fate is indeed horrible (enslaved to aliens until the day he dies, and dies probably because they've decided he's now useless to them), but then his deeds were also horrible.  Human justice, in the absence of aliens, would have gotten him either death, life imprisonment or (his actual previous state) probable lifelong incarceration in an insane asylum.  It is arguable which fates are worse:  the ones he meted out to his victims, the one he was previously suffering in the mental hospital, or the one to which he has been sold.

It is horrible that he should fall in love only to murder the object of his adoration.  It's obvious that what Wayne was feeling was some sort of love:  how true was the love is open to debate.  There was some obvious self-deception here:  Wayne's perversion obviously comes in part from a combination of sexual desire and an inability to accept the reality of female sexuality, as witness his excuse to himself for murdering an eleven-year-old girl, nine years ago:

... if I hadn't done her she would have been twenty or so.  Screwing all the boys.  Probably on dope.  Maybe knocked up or married.  Looked at in a certain way, I saved her a lot of sordid, miserable stuff, menstruating, letting the boys' hands and mouths on her, all that ...

(at which point the aliens send him pain to stop this line of thought).

Note Wayne's assumptions and logic, or lack of logic.  That being "twenty" means being promiscious or addicted to drugs.  That pregnancy and marriage are worse than being violently murdered.  That killing someone is "saving" them ... from life?  Keep in mind that Wayne neither knew his victim nor had any real reason to assume that any of the bad things on his list would have happened (well, aside from menstruation), and most humans would probably consider the combination of sex, preganancy and marriage to be an overwhelmingly good life path, if not combined with the promiscuity and drug abuse.

Pohl here has the mentality of a certain type of serial killer dead accurate:  the killer rejects life in general, and murders from nihilism, constructing rationalizations to avoid hating himself.  Wayne in point of fact is not someone one would want to have freely wandering the world:  the combination of his impulses and his rationalization makes it highly likely that he will kill again and again if not kept under control, whether in the crude physical sense of incarceration or the more advanced mental sense of the alien mindlink.

Which puts one in the interesting position of defending slavery.  For the aliens' offer makes sense:  it's good for the vast majority of people on the Earth, and the few people for whom it is really, really bad (the slaves) are people who in any case would be sentenced to death or life imprisonment, either of which is arguably worse than slavery to the aliens.

On the other hand, do we really know that all the Purchased People are at least as bad as Wayne?  And slavery to the aliens does mean death in the end -- from overstrain and eventual disposal in "three decades" or more, or as an experimental subject as happened to Carolyn.  We incidentally have no idea what Carolyn did to be sold into slavery -- it might have been something for which the normal penalty would have been far short of life imprisonment or death. 

And what about the wrongfully-convicted?  There is, as far as we know, no appeal from being Purchased, though it's possible that the aliens might in some cases allow resales.  Certainly the Purchased Person himself would lack the time to start any sort of appeal, even if the aliens did not stop him from doing so on his free time.  It seems to me that an innocent Purchased Person would be as unlikely to ever be released to return home as would a black slave already in the New World.

This gets into the final chill I get from the story.

People Purchase -- especially of the worst criminals -- makes sense.  Not only in the context of the storyverse, but in general.  Assuming the technological ability to implant mind control units, and some distance or other reason why you wouldn't want to use your own valued people to do the job, it's economically and even socially reasonable to use society's rejects as living drones.  It's socially easier the less they are wanted:  obviously it would be much more acceptable to use someone like Charles Manson for this purpose than  it would be to use Harry Hooch the alcoholic who lives under a bridge.

And it is a plausible alien contact scenario.  Aliens might find it difficult to physically cross interstellar distances, or to live under our environmental conditions.  Living remotes -- essentially bioroid drones -- would be an obvious alternative, especially if they had FTL radio (which might be easier under real-life physics to develop than would be macroscopic FTL travel).  If they have enough of an understanding of living neural nets, using the existing bioroids -- us -- might make more sense than either transporting them across interstellar distances, or assembling them on site on Earth.

Indeed, if the story were being done today, one obvious variant would be to use some sort of mind-control meme --- essentially a "computer virus" transmissible to our brains --- compelling the slave to check in at intervals through a single shared FTL radio -- rather than the FTL radio implants, which might be difficult to put in the limited space of a human cranium.  This is if anything a creepier idea, since it would then be much less obvious at a glance who was a Purchased Person, and what if the meme was inter-human transmissible and the aliens decided to do a little freelance slaving ...?

Conclusion:  In short, a deeply chilling and yet mostly hard-SF horror story, which I recommend to one and all.

Retro Review - "Child of All Ages" (1975) by Phillip James Plauger (SPOILERS)

Phillip James Plauger is a physicist and nuclear physicist, who wrote only a dozen or so science fiction short stories, mostly in the 1970's, then in 1995 founded Dinkumware, Ltd., a company which supplies Standard C and Standard C++ libraries.  The world of information technology has benefitted, but the world of science fiction sadly lost by this career move, judging by this short story.

"Child of All Ages," set in the present day (c. 1975) is about Melissa, who looks about 11 years old, claims to be 14, and was actually born sometime around 460 BC in ancient Athens.  Her father was what later ages would call an alchemist, and in his search for the secret of immortality he found a herbal potion that will indeed stave off aging indefinitely.  The catch is that it only works on pre-pubescent children, and that entering puberty ends the effectiveness of the medicine.

For obvious reasons, Melissa's parents died long ago:  Melissa kept on living.  She's semi-immune to disease and can regenerate minor mutiliations (such as losing a finger); she even grows a new set of teeth every couple of centuries.  All she needs to keep on living is to take her medicine at regular intervals, and not let anyone kill her. 

This has from time to time been difficult for her, as many of the periods through which she has lived have been dangerous ones and a child alone can be very vulnerable.  She is however highly intelligent, charming and resourceful, and by the late 20th century has over twenty-four centuries of accumulated wisdom and guile on which to draw to stay alive.

Melissa usually keeps her true nature secret, moving from place to place, foster-family to foster-family, to avoid questions about why she never seems to get any older.   Her life can often be lonely.  She has found friends, lovers, and even husbands from time to time (in pre-industrial civlizations, people were willing to marry a lot earlier than is deemed decent today), but in time they grow suspicious or die, and she must seek another home.

Her potion does work on other children, and very occasionally she has revealed herself to a friend or lover she especially liked, hoping that they could remain together for a very long time.  Inevitably, though, her companion will become discontented with eternal childhood, and choose to grow up, and then die (the story does not make it clear if they then live a normal lifespan or if they die quickly upon hitting puberty).  And once again, Melissa is left alone.

From time to time, she tries trusting some adults with the truth, in the hopes that they will accept her and let her live with them and conceal from others her true nature.  She tries this with May, a social worker; George, May's historian husband, and George, Sr., May's biochemist father-in-law, in part because she feels that the combination of a social worker, a historian and a biochemist might better understand her than would most normal humans.

The story is about how this works out -- and doesn't.

This is a really beautiful story:  sad and sentimental without being saccharine; much like Melissa herself, who is every bit as sweet as her name and every bit as pragmatic and cynical as one would expect of someone who has outlasted whole Toynbeean cycles of Civilization.  In her very long life she's known great pleasure, and agonizing pain, and while she does not really trust normal humans any more, she still needs them and is capable of loving them.

She's very much the star of this story, and quite believable both as someone who started out as a very smart child and has now become a personality whose accumulated experience makes her not entirely human by our psychological definitions, but is in no way a monster.  She's both superhuman, and yet deep down a lonely little girl, and it's impossible not to love her.

Which is, of course, one of her most potent tools for survival.

"A Child of All Ages" was nominated for a Nebula in 1975 and a Hugo in 1976, and re-reading it I can see why.  It is a great character story, while at the same time being great science fiction.

Damon Knight and the Conceptual Ancestry of the Mundane SF Movement

"Damon Knight and the Conceptual Ancestry

of the Mundane SF Movement"

(c) 2011 by Jordan S. Bassior

Introduction

As those of you who've been following this blogzine may have noticed, I love both space opera and planetary romances, and have a deep contempt for the Mundane science-fiction movement.  In "The Fear of Boundlessness" and "The Promise of Boundlessness," I discussed the conceptual origins of the movement in an implicitly pre-Copernican cosmology, in which the Earth is the only "really real" place, eternal home to human actions, and the "Heavens" are a spiritual place, literally above gross human concerns; and discussed the fear of the true scale of the Universe in space and time, as revealed by modern astronomy and astrophysics.  In those articles, and again in "Selective Science for Mundane Fiction," I demonstrated in detail that the Mundane movement, far from being rooted in "hard science," operates by ignoring those aspects of "hard science" which would render the limitations they propose on the human future to be silly, short-sighted and absurdly parochial in a vast Universe. 

Recently, I discovered a forty-year old article, "Goodbye, Henry J. Kostkos, Goodbye," by Damon Knight (1922-2002), in Clarion II (1972), which demonstrated even older roots to this attitude, way back in the American branch of the late New Wave.  Knight shows in this essay both a greater grasp of science than the modern Mundanes (though he makes a major error in his understanding of cultural evolution) but also more nakedly displays the hatred of humanity which lies at the core of the Mundaniacs, and for this reason the article is highly interesting.

I. Donald A. Wollheim's Cosmogony of the Future

Damon Knight starts by explaining that he no longer can take the old space operas and planetary romances seriously and thus cannot derive as much pleasure from them as was once possible.  He says that the reason why is that there has been a fundamental shift in the attitude of science fiction, in which he has shared, from what we would today call one paradigm of the future to another.

The "old" view, as he terms it, was famously outlined by Donald A. Wollheim (1914-1990) in The Universe Makers (1971).  Summarized, Wollheim's "Cosmogony of the Future" divides the likely human future, as explored by science fiction, into a number of "stages," as follows (reprinted and summarized by James Gunn and Thomas Seay here:


First we have the initial voyages to the moon and to the planets of our Solar System. In this sequence we also include stories of the contact of man with intelligent species elsewhere in this system—Martians, Jovians, Venusians, if any. Stories of the first efforts to set up terrestrial bases on such planets. Stories of the first colonies of such worlds, their problems internal and external, their conflicts with the parent world, their breakaway or interplanetary commerce, spaceship trade lanes, space pirates, asteroid mining, the weird wonders of the Outer Planets, and so forth.

Second, the first flights to the stars. The problem of whether science can ever exceed the speed of light: a very important one where the problem of colonization is concerned. Starships, ships that must travel centuries and contain generations, descended from the original crews. Other planets of other stars. Intelligences on such planets and our problems with them or against them. Human colonies on other starry systems. Contact with Mother Earth, independence or dependence. Commerce, exploitation or otherwise.

Third, the Rise of the Galactic Empire. The rise of contact and commerce between many human-colonized worlds or many worlds of alien intelligences that have come to trust and do business with one another. The problem of mutual relations and the solution, usually in the form of treaties or defensive alliances. Implacable aliens in the cosmos who must be fought. The need for defense. The rise of industrial or financial or political powers, the eventual triumph of one and the establishment of a federation, a union, an alliance, or an autocratic empire of worlds, dominated usually from Old Earth.

Fourth, the Galactic Empire in full bloom, regardless of what form it takes. Commerce between worlds as established fact, and adventures while dealing with worlds in and out of the Empire. The farthest planets, those of the Galactic Rim, considered as mavericks. The problems of aliens again outside the Empire, and outside our own galaxy. Politics within the government setup, intrigues, and dynasties, robotic mentalities versus human mentalities. "Terra-forming" worlds for colonization. The exploration of the rest of the galaxy by official exploration ships, or adventurers, or commercial pioneers.

Fifth, the Decline and Fall of the Galactic Empire. Intrigue and palace revolt. Breakaway planets. The alliance of worlds strained beyond its limits by rebellion, alien wars, corruption, scientific inability to keep up with internal or external problems. The rise of restless subject worlds. Decline, then loss of contact with farthest worlds, crumbling of commerce, failure of space lanes, distrust, finally worlds withdrawing into themselves as the empire/alliance/federation/union becomes an empty shell or is destroyed at its heart.

Sixth, the Interregnum. Worlds reverting to prespace-flight conditions, savagery, barbarism, primitive forms of life, superstition. Worlds taking to barbarian raids on defenseless isolated planets, hastening the downfall of knowledge. Fragments of space flight, fragments of empire, some starships, some efforts to revive. Thousands of years of loss of contact. Humanity in this period becomes indigenous to most of the habitable planets of the galaxy, forgetting origins. Evolutionary changes may take place. Alterations of form to fit differing world conditions—giant men, tiny men, water-dwelling men, flying men, mutations.

Seventh, the Rise of a Permanent Galactic Civilization. The restoration of commerce between worlds. The reexploration of lost and uncontacted worlds and the bringing them back to high-technology, democratic levels. The efforts to establish trade between human worlds that no longer seem kin. Beating down new efforts to form empires, efforts which sometimes succeed and revert to approximations of the previous period, with similar results. The exploration of other galaxies and the entire universe.

Eighth, the Challenge to God. Galactic harmony and an undreamed-of high level of knowledge leads to experiments in creation, to harmony between galactic clusters, and possible explorations of the other dimensions of existence. The effort to match Creation and to solve the last secrets of the universe. Sometimes seeking out and confronting the Creative Force or Being or God itself, sometimes merging with that Creative First Premise. The end of the universe, the end of time, the beginning of a new universe or a new time-space continuum.

(from Wollheim. The Universe Makers. New York: Harper & Row, 1971.)

Now, there are a few points I would make about this outline.

A.  It is very generic, as it has to be to fit many different science fiction universes.  For instance, it specifies neither the sorts of technologies being used for interplanetary, interstellar or intergalactic flight or colonization, nor does it specify the governments which administer these future human polities.  It merely states what technologies and governments and situations might appear at the various stages.  It also says nothing about how long each stage lasts, save for the occasional "centuries" or "thousands of years."

B.  It makes one very big assumption:  namely, that the human race will survive long enough to colonize the other worlds.  In general, science-fiction futures may be divided into "optimistic" or "pessimistic" based on whether or not they assume that high-tech humanity will survive long enough to colonize other worlds.  (The third option, that high-tech humanity will simply live on Earth and only Earth forever, makes very little sense, unless "forever" is a very short time even on a species timescale).

C.  Given the assumption that high-tech humanity survives long enough to colonize other worlds, it is difficult to argue against the fundamental premises of this "cosmogony of the future," because they are firmly rooted in historical reality.  Humans do expand into any and all available environments, they do found colonial empires, and their civilizations do rise and fall with some regularity.  Of course, this sequence could at any point be aborted by the extermination of the human race at any stage, as mentioned under "B" -- though the human race would be the more difficult to exterminate the more widely they colonized, for obvious reasons.

So, given the strong logic underlying Wollheim's outline, what logical arguments does Knight advance against this scheme?

He doesn't.  Instead, he advances a set of feelings:  and feelings of a nature highly-relevant to the later Mundane SF Movement.

II.   Knight's Feelings About the Cosmogony of the Future

Knight first points out that Wollheim analogizes humanity to mold in a petri dish.  Wollheim had written:

Let us watch what happens next ... The several spots grow.  They begin to touch each other's borders.  There is a brief period of stasis, then they grow around and into each other.  In time the petri dish is one solid surface of mold life and no untouched part of the nutriment can be seen.  The mold flourishes.  It grows dense.  It grows tall.  It then flowers -- it begins to form spore balls.

Assume that the lid of the dish is taken off.  The spore balls reach maturity -- they burst and send out into the atmosphere millions and millions of new spore seeds to float away.  After this flowering the mold forest begins to diminish.  The nutriment of the dish is being exhausted.  Some of the mold begins to dry up, to die away ...

Knight considers this analogy somehow detrimental to Wollheim's point, but actually it's an excellent one:  this is a good description of how self-replicating entities (like life forms, or cultural entities) behave.  They expand until they encounter an obstacle, then (if this obstacle is somehow surmounted) expand further.  An area which they have thickly inhabited for long tends to die, because the local resources have been exhausted.

This is of course, an argument against trying to live on Just One Earth forever.  The longer we live in only one tiny spot in the Universe, the greater the risk of local resource exhaustion.  The mold culture would not have benefitted had the lid of the dish remained on forever -- it would have died.  Likewise, a humanity confined to one world, for the rest of its existence, will die out sooner than if it expands to many worlds.

Knight then asks:

But what is the basis for this almost universal belief that it is good for us to explore, colonize, and annex new worlds?

He clearly considers this a rhetorical question, because he never answers it.  But the question is answerable.  We believe this for two cultural-evolutionary reasons, one Darwinian and the other Lamarckian in nature. 

The Darwinian one is that cultures which do not "explore, colonize and annex new worlds" are very quickly relegated to the sidelines in competition with other cultures, if they do not wind up so weak in comparison with other cultures that they are casually and with ridiculous ease "colonized" and "annexed" by those other cultures.  Consequently, we inherit our beliefs overwhelmingly from cultures which do so expand.

The Lamarckian one is that humans, being sapient, are quite capable of seeing that cultures which fail to grow will die, and thus want their own cultures to keep on growing, that they may last as long and rise as high as possible.  Consequently, save in very sick cultures, most thinkers consider expansion and growth to be good things in and of themselves.

Knight then parenthisizes:

(I call it "almost universal," because there are some few non-believers -- the American Indians, for example, the black people of Africa, etc.) 

which is a hilariously-condescending and historically-ignorant statement.  In point of fact the American Indians and Black Africans did consider expansion and growth to be good things, and repeatedly demonstrated this by producing and trading things and warring against their rivals.  These native peoples simply lost out in competition to Western cultures.  Today (and in 1972 for that matter), they are rising again, in part because they have adopted superior Western attitudes and in part because the West is no longer hostile to them.

Knight again asks rhetorically:

Wouldn't it perhaps be better to stay on this planet, clean it up a little, and reduce our numbers to some reasonable figure, so that we don't have "to dry up, to die away?"

Again, this is a question that is far from rhetorical, but instead deserves some analysis and answer.

First, note that this is a clear "false dichotomy."  Knight assumes that we must either overpopulate the Earth and then spill out to other worlds, leaving a ruined planet behind us, or utterly avoid expansion beyond the Earth's surface.  He ignores the obvious possibility that we might "clean up" the Earth while colonizing other worlds, which would of course be a more desirable outcome than either of Knight's offered choices.  Even more fundamentally, he ignores the possibility that access to the resources of other worlds might make it easier to "clean up" the Earth, rather than the effort of such colonization making it more difficult.

Secondly, the implicit assumption underlying this false dichotomy is the belief that, if we have the OPTION of colonizing other worlds in our future, we will be much more likely to ruin the Earth.  And, of course, this is one of the exact assumptions of Mundane SF, namely:

That this dream of abundance [from colonizing other worlds] can encourage a wasteful attitude to the abundance that is here on Earth.

But it's also interesting to examine the dichotomy on its own terms.  If we were limited to the choice between ruining the Earth and expanding outward, or not ruining the Earth but also not expanding outward, which would be better for the human species?  Logically, the first one (ruin the Earth while expanding to other worlds) because that would render us as a species independent of the fate of any one planet.  (Of course, wrecking the Earth would be stupid, but I did specify limitation to the false dichotomy for the duration of this paragraph).

But Knight misses an even larger point.  There is no one leader which can decide for the whole human race whether or not we will stay home or expand outward.  Just because (say) America, or Russia, accepts Knight's argument does not mean that (say) China, or India, or for that matter Lockheed-Martin, will accept this argument.  Inevitably, those human groups which choose to expand offworld will gain control of greater energies and territories and consequently wealth and power than those who remain at home.

And even if such a leader existed, he could not make the decision for all time.  Leaders are mortal, ideologies are mortal, civilizations are mortal.  If, for instance, China became the Universal State of the Global Civilization, and decided to not only not expand outward but to violently prevent everyone from doing so, then Man would be confined to the Earth -- for the duration of the dominance of the Chinese Global Empire.  But the Chinese Global Empire would be unlikely to rule humanity forever, and a successor state might very well adopt a different policy. 

Even an immortal Emperor could not hold on to power forever.  All things pass, and the only way in which the decision could be truly final would be if the human race was annihilated at the same time that the Emperor fell from power.  This is of course possible, but hardly necessary, or even likely.

Knight then says that Wollheim

can't see that the same goofy idealism that made us welcome the atomic bomb (because it would lead to the world state and Utopia), urbanization, the federal highway program, and so on (Progress) will lead us to still greater triumphs of stupidity and greed if, God forbid, the program of interstellar conquest he cherishes should ever be carried out.

(emphasis mine)

To begin with, it is hardly "goofy idealism" to welcome any or all of the list of technological advances.  The "atomic bomb" was part of the general unlocking of the power of the atom, which among other things has given us nuclear energy.  Even the specifically-explosive aspect of nuclear energy turned out to be beneficial:  it ended the Pacific War and prevented the Cold War from developing into World War III.

"Urbanization" (which began thousands of years ago, and is thus hardly a recent development even from the POV of 1972) has enabled craft specialization, the development of markets and intellectual cross-fertilization on a very large scale.  Were it not for urbanization, we would not have developed general literacy, and there would be no forum within which Damon Knight could make this argument!

It is debatable whether the US Federal Interstate Highway System (which is of what Damon Knight speaks here, at the time of writing the enabling Act was only 16 years old) was an optimum solution to the problem of interstate cargo transportation and passenger travel (in point of fact it was meant as a solution to the problem of interstate military mechanized mobility, but like the Roman roads of two millennia earlier turned out to have many other useful applications), but it certainly was a solution.  The interstate highways make long-distance personal travel much easier, and today carry about 24 percent of all our highway traffic.

So all three strike me as mostly-good things, and if these be "stupidity and greed," make mine a moron miser sandwich!

But the real money line is

 if, God forbid, the program of interstellar conquest he cherishes should ever be carried out.

Aside from the assumption that human expansion through the Universe would necessarily constitute "conquest" in some evil militaristic sense, which is debatable and would also obviously depend on the motives and actions of some undetermined number of alien civilizations we might encounter, note that he's saying here that he doesn't WANT humanity to expand beyond the Earth.

And here we've arrived at the meat of the later Mundane SF Movement.  Damon Knight, coming from a more intellectually-rigorous era (and one with a fandom who on the average had a far better understanding of science), accepted the inevitable technological possibility of interplanetary and interstellar expansion:  it's built into the laws of physics.  Knight's error is that he imagines that the human race can decide not to do something, and make this decision stick for all humans and all time.  Geoff Ryman, who lives in a less intellectually-rigorous era and is dealing with far less well scientifically-educated fans, imagines expansion beyond the Earth to be made impossible by his personal fiat:  he does not understand that (and indeed gets cranky, in both senses of the word, when) the laws of physics do not support his emotionally pre-Copernican worldview.

There is also a general hatred of humanity at work here.  Why does Knight assume that human expansion to other worlds would logically be worse than those worlds remaining uninhabited, or inhabited by aliens, or expanded onto by aliens (the other options)?  The assumption operating here is that Nature Unspoiled is better than human colonization, and that alien colonization is better than human colonization, and at no point does he explain why, other than that we have been known to make mistakes.  Why should he assume that aliens wouldn't make the same mistakes -- or different and worse ones?

Damon Knight then goes on with a rant in support of "the new science-fiction writers" against the presumed assumptions of "old guard" science fiction, which is not well-justified either by the actual literary corpus or the logical demands of extraterrestrial expansion:

What the new science-fiction writers are telling us is precisely that a culture can't keep on growing geometrically forever; that Bigger isn't necessarily and always Better; that the quality of life is more important now than the quantity,

I have, in fact, read rather a lot of the "old" science-fiction, and I can assure you that not all (or even most of it) argues that a culture can "keep on growing geometrically forever" (indeed, much of it is precisely about the way in which growth is limited by available habitat, namely colonizable worlds), nor that "Bigger is necessarily and always Better" (more commonly, it argues that smarter is necessarily and always Better), nor that the quantity of life is more important than the quality.

and that we are faced with a whole congeries of unanswered and mostly unasked question about ourselves:  who are we?  where have we come from?  where are we going?  what is a man?  and how should he live?

Science fiction has mostly been primarily about just such questions since H. G. Wells modified it into its present form, some seventy-five years BEFORE Knight penned this critique.  Indeed, in part Wollheim's "cosmogony of the future" was written in answer to such questions.  Just because Knight didn't like the answers doesn't mean that the question hasn't been posed and answered many times already.

Conclusion

Well, we all know what happened.  The New Wave ended, and space opera came back strong, especially in science fiction novels.  To some extent the "new writing" dominated the magazines, though, and I believe that it is partly in consequence of this that the short story format has been dying out. 

I've noticed a prevalence, especially since 2000, of self-consciously "literary" short stories in the annual anthologies.  These stories tend to have gaping logical or scientific flaws and (in the worst cases) no discernable plot or even point to them, and it's easy to see why they are unloved by the fans.  So in this venue the "New Writers" indeed did win, though they don't seem to be having much joy in their triumph.

Meanwhile, space opera grows as a genre and spawns multi-book series and doorstopper books.  Among the practicioners who rose to prominence after 1972 have been Alan Dean Foster, Alastair Reynolds, Peter Hamilton, Stephen Baxter and David Weber.  Also, among the "Killer B's," Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, and David Brin, all of whom had important publications before or around 1972, but whose careers didn't really take off until the 1970's and 1980's.  All of these have written futures which can clearly be fit into Wollheim's cosmogony, and all of them are wildly popular.

It may be relevant here that Damon Knight was one of the founders of, and Geoff Ryman a product of, the Clarion Writers' Workshops.  In a very real sense the Mundane SF Movement was founded to try and revive Knight's dream of a science-fiction future without space colonization -- and thankfully, it seems to be going the same way as the movement of the "new writers."

And science fiction marches on.

Retro Review - The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin, 1974)

This is a reposted copy of an (edited and slightly updated) reprint of a review I posted on Usenet back in 2001 of Ursula K. LeGuin's great novel The Dispossessed, a book which I greatly enjoyed but also found to be greatly flawed. Here are my comments, which focus more on the world-building logic and its effect on the theme than on the characterization or description, which are excellent.

===

I. Loaded Comparisons

It's interesting that Ursula K. LeGuin does not dare to compare Anarres with any society as free as, say, the 20th century West (even the one existing in the early 1970's, which was in many respects more troubled that the one of today).

There are three major nations on Urras.

A-Io, the capitalistic liberal democracy where most of the Urrasti action is set, can best be described as a country with the social attitudes of Victorian England, the riot control skills of Late Tsarist Russia -- these coexisting with fusion power and interplanetary space travel. Women are barred from most occupations. Lower-class persons defer to upper-class ones. Peaceful demonstrations are dealt with by strafing the crowd and then hunting down the survivors for days.

(Now, A-Io is of course a fictional culture, and the author is within her rights to make it misogynistic, stratified, and cruel. But when she deliberately structures the novel to invite comparison -- for instance, by cutting from Arras to A-Io each alternate chapter -- one is bound to ask why she picks a very nasty society to serve as her example of a capitalist liberal democracy).

Thu, the main rival of A-Io, is not described in detail, but from the clues given is obviously a Stalinist communist dictatorship. Benbili, the country that A-Io and Thu have a war over during the course of the book, is a chaotic "Third World" country, normally ruled by a military dictatorship, which is overthrown by an unconvincingly described revolution, with the A-Iotians then restoring the dictator to power.

Terra (Urras and Anarres both orbit Tau Ceti) has suffered a catastrophic population collapse in her past (from 9 to 1/2 billion), and submitted to a horrendously totalitarian regime in reaction to this die-off:

As a Terran character says:

"Well, we had saved what could be saved, and made a kind of life in the ruins, on Terra, in the only way it could be done: by total centralization. Total control over the use of every acre of land, every scrap of metal, every ounce of fuel. Total rationing, birth control, euthanasia, universal conscription into the labor force, toward the goal of racial survival."

This "solution," incidentally, is one that based on the historical evidence seems unlikely to work: one can more reasonably assume that "racial survival" is the excuse the rulers of the horrible culture described there uses to maintain their dominance. I wonder if this was one of the inspirations for Vernor Vinge's hellish "Emergency," the space bad guys in A Darkness in the Sky?

The Hainish are "total altruists" dominated by awareness of their own age and cultural guilt for some crime: we don't learn much about them (maybe in her other books?).

At no point do we see a non-mysoginistic, humane, liberal democratic capitalism -- such as the one that we live in today -- practiced by anyone. In fact, LeGuin implicitly argues that such is impractical over the long run, because one may presume that such a culture (ours)was at least partially responsible for the ruin of Terra. But I submit that almost every reader, given a choice between, say, the America of 1970 and any of the cultures detailed in the book, would have picked America in 1970. Let alone America c.2000!


II. Unconvincingly Utopian Ambiguity

For all the talk of an "ambigious" Utopia, Anarres is culturally working far better, 167 years after the colonization, than seems likely. We're supposed to believe that the Syndic of Initiative is the first serious dissent that the culture has ever had, that the reaction to them is the first repression that the culture has ever known, and that Anarres is in some meaningful sense a society perpetually "in revolution" (I'm minded of Kodos and Kang's "twirling, twirling towards progress" when I read that line!) :)

This despite the fact that there are features in this culture that would be obvious handles for a tyrant to grasp. For instance, the worst sins are "egoism" and "profiteering." Thoughts along these lines are bad; expressing them is worse.

Now, because all humans have a strong sense of personal identity, and try to ensure that they produce more than they consume in any endeavor meant to constitute "work," these are "sins" which every (sane) human being can be properly "accused" of. This means that every Anarresti should know he's a miserable sinner (or be convinceable of same by a skilled speaker). This is a tailor-made opportunity for petty tyranny.

Yet, apparently, nothing like this happened until Shevek and his pals were born?

(We don't know, it after all could be that they never tried to find out what happened in the past. But it's a big omission, that even Shevek's slightly paranoid friend never tried to find this out).


III. Anarrean Lethargy

At that, there are aspects of Anarresti society that don't make a lot of sense unless we assume that their culture is not very good at identifying and pursuing opportunities. I don't know if this was _intentional_ on the part of the author, but here goes.

A. Tourist Lethargy - The Anarresti have and enforce a de facto non-intercourse policy with the rest of the Universe, analogous to that of Shogunate Japan. Their trade with Urras is grudging and restricted to vital items. Information going in and out is censored. They ignore (!) the coming of interstellar aliens (!!!). Shevek is supposedly the first person to travel from Anarres to Urras for over a century, which if true argues that the restrictions used to be even more severe. He has to avoid a rock-throwing mob in order to leave the planet. This is a level of xenophobia the Iranian ayatollahs only wish their own people possessed.

B. Navigational Lethargy - The Anarresti have a space fleet consisting of 12 ships, which are currently capable of repeated atmospheric launch and re-entry (they haven't lost any in some 167 years, unless they have a treaty with the Urrasti to replace the losses), and which were originally capable of inter-lunar flight (these ships are how they got there).

This means that the Anarreans, at least theoretically, could go anywhere in the system -- if you can reach the orbit of a terrestrial planet, you're "halfway to anywhere" (in Pournelle's famous phrase). Unless Tau Ceti has a very weird system, it's gotta have more than the twin Anarresti-Urrasti planet.

Yet the Anarresti can't think of anything better to do with their ships than to arm them and use them as a patrol against (apparently non-existent, because there's no mention of even attempted smuggling anywhere in the story) alien incursions. Given that their ships are over one and a half centuries old, and that the Urrasti have been updating their own spaceflight technology, they would presumably be as useful against an Urrasti invasion as war junks against ships of the line.

Now, you could argue that the Urrasti don't let the Anarresti colonize anywhere else in the Cetan system. You could -- except that nobody mentions this, not even the paranoidly anti-Urrasti who oppose the Syndic of Initiative. You'd think that if the Urrasti were so restricting the Anarresti, that this would be a sore spot with the Anarresti patriots, wouldn't you?

Heck, it doesn't even seem to occur to the Anarresti that they have what amounts to 12 capacious suborbital transports -- all Anarresti air transportation seems to be accomplished by dirigible! The limitation of their most valuable craft to "defense" against a non-present "enemy", who would be overwhelming if he ever came, is profoundly irrational, and creepy in terms of the level of implied paranoia.

C. Industrial Lethargy - The Anarresti have a metal-rich planet. This is, in fact, the whole _basis_ of their interplanetary economy. Yet, at the same time, they have so little heavy industry that the construction of a single oceanic barge will consume a good portion of their whole industrial capacity for a year, according to Shevek. Why?

D. Commercial Lethargy - The Annaresti metals output includes gold. Yet, for some reason (probably their horror of "profiteering"), it doesn't occur to them to increase their gold output, develop a foreign exchange surplus, and use this to purchase heavy durable goods from Urras to improve the standard of living on Annares. Instead, they limit their trade to what sounds like a mutual tributary arrangement; the sort of thing the Egyptians and Hittites had with each other on the royal level.

They do primarily import high-tech machinery and biotechnicals from Urras, in fact, but they don't seem to be cutting very good deals. My opinion is that the Urrasti are probably sharping them for everything they can).

E. Maritime Lethargy - Anarres has a very sparse, very fragile land ecosystem, but a much richer and more complex oceanic ecosystem. So what do the Anarresti do?

They live on the plains and mostly ignore the oceans, though at the point of the story, they are just beginning (!), under the lash of famine (!) to research the possibility of fishing and aquaculture. Um ... duh?

F. Biological Activity - There is one thing that the Anarresti do a lot of, though it's described by LeGuiin with all the eroticism of a musketry drill. That's have sex.

Unfortunately for the Anarresti, they make motherhood real easy -- free food, and free creches and education for the children. With the predictable result.

Anarres is overpopulated. BADLY overpopulated.

"What!" I hear you cry. "But there are only a few million Anarresti!" How can they be overpopulated?"

The answer is that "overpopulation" is a problem of the ratio between energy, food, and other economic resources, on the one hand, and people on the other. A wealthy, crowded city is not overpopulated. A poor community living dispersed on an arid plain may well be overpopulated.

We know that Anarres suffers from severe overpopulation because they have evolved a way of lie (farming on an arid planet vulnerable to years-long droughts) which should require immense food surpluses be laid up in granaries and other storehouses. Instead, everyone can take food as long as there is no extreme shortage. (This is explicitly stated by Shevek in the scene with the laid-up train).

Thus, the accumulation of large food surpluses is impossible. (Heck it would be "profiteering" to even try!) And, when the drought hits, we witness an atomic-powered industrial civilization suffering from the sort of famine that the Pharaohs of Egypt had managed to avoid with a muscle-powered agricultural one.

Good going, Odonists. Circle of Life, and all that. *snicker*

IV. Weird War Tales

A. Weapons, Weapons, Who's Got the Weapons?

The Benbilian revolutionaries overthrow an armed military dictatorship -- presumably, they defeat his troops. Yet, when the A-Iotians invade, one reason the A-Iotian forces can conquer so easily is that most of the revolutionaries are unarmed.

Huh? All I can say is that the Benbilian Army must have made the Tsarist Russians look competent by comparison. And what happened to all the weapons that the Benbilian Army presumably had before the revolution? Did they commit suicide out of grief for the fall of the ancien regime?

B. Guerrilla My Dreams

Shevek, master of military strategy, floors an Urrasti in debate by pointing out that military hierarchy is unnecessary, since, after all, guerrillas manage without such things. Apparently, LeGuin had never troubled herself to learn anything about guerilla warfare, which is especially funny given that America was actually involved in a guerrilla war at the time that she wrote this book -- with guerrillas who had a very highly developed military hierarchy.

C. Crowd Control -- The Final Solution

The climatic A-Iotian riot scene, set in their capital city, involves a crowd of a hundred thousand or so workers, being strafed by helicopter gunships (the Blue Thunder approach to riot control, apparently). After this, the crowd is broken up by troops supported by armored cars (apparently, riot police weren't an Urrasti invention). THEN, the A-Iotian military tries to hunt down and kill the survivors.

Why? Are the A-Iotians utterly determined to decimate their own workforce? What's the point of hunting down defeated demonstrators, anyway? And how, incidentally, can the troops tell rioters from other people in the city. It looks to me as if the A-Iotian army is sacking its own capital!


Conclusion

The Dispossessed is a good book, but very deeply flawed. Ursula K. LeGuin intended to compare and contrast Anarres with the real world, but did so only by loading the balance scales -- the "real world" shown is a combination of the worst of capitalist societies; Anarres is an idealized anarcho-socialist utopia with very managable problems. At the same time, many of the problems are "the planet ate my work" type problems, supposedly due to the harshness of the environment, but clearly (to me, anyway) due to Anarresti lethargy in exploiting their opportunities.

It is peculiarly a book of its times -- the early 1970's, when many intellectuals felt that America was fundamentally flawed, and that there was something better -- and alien to our founding principles -- that could be built. This is not how we feel today.

As such, I don't know how well it will last, save with the support of nostalgic teachers.

(c) 2001, 2006, 2011, Jordan S. Bassior