As sometimes happens, I have googled the name of the fictional planet, Unan Besar, and all that has come up is the text of this story set on Unan Besar.
My Simplistic Summary Of Civilizations
Economics: production and distribution.
Politics: power and resistance.
History: progress or regression.
"Production" means production of necessities which, on Unan Besar, include an antitoxin administered in the form of a large blue pill. When Dominic Flandry arrives at the spaceport, Nias Warouw, who introduces himself as "'...director of the Guard Corps of the Planetary Biocontrol...,'" (p. 6):
shows Flandry a vial of pills;
explains that he will need one pill every thirty days while on the planet;
withdraws the vial when Flandry reaches for it;
offers to give him a single dose immediately;
explains that it is illegal to dispense more than one at a time;
adds that Biocontrol must keep careful records.
Of course they must! Or, to put it another way, why should they? No one records the air that we breathe. Surely the antitoxin can be produced in sufficient quantity to be distributed either cheap or free so that everyone can live safely on Unan Besar? But everyone living safely is not the purpose of the economy, is it? Control of production and distribution is power and this seems to be another case of "Resistance is useless!" (Scroll down.) So can there be any progress? Yes, because Flandry has arrived.
Meanwhile, Flandry, contemplating Warouw's careful doling out of one antitoxin pill at a time, remarks that he believes he does understand.
3 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Biocontrol rose to power on Unan Besar because of, first, ordinary foolishness and corruption. Then technocratic "idealists" used production of the antitoxin to set up reformist gov't which promised to hold power only as long as the "emergency" lasted. And, as so often happens, the emergency never ended and Biocontrol became a dictatorship using its control of the antitoxin to force obedience to its rule. The pattern is all too familiar!
Yes, the arrival of Flanddry on Unan Besar measns drastic things are going to happen!
Ad astra! Sean
In fact, Biocontrol is worse than most oligarchies because it has literal life-and-death power over the whole population.
So while low-level resistance is possible (by the criminal element, if nothing else, or 'drop-outs' like the treedwellers Flandry falls in with) overt revolt of any real sort is not, nor is open opposition.
This means Biocontrol can be a comic-opera of incompetence and corruption, and still retain power. It doesn't have to have the scope or efficiency of a genuine totalitarian system to have a similar degree of power, and it has no external enemies to force reforms in order to compete.
Until it screws up so badly that the antitoxin production system breaks down, after which everyone will die.
(That's obviously coming; the economy is regressing into a pre-industrial form. But the antitoxin cannot be produced at that level.)
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I agree, in any normal situation no regime as laughably incompetent and corrupt as Biocontrol could possibly have lasted as long as it did on Unan Besar. It survived only because of that monopoly control of the antitoxin.
And I recall how Flandry and others commented on how needlessly primitive Unan Besar was, with Biocontrol itself encouraging this regression. As you said, it could not last forever, because the antitoxin needed for survival requires a sophisticated and scientific culture to be manufactured.
I recall Flandry cynically commenting to one of the ruling directors of Biocontrol that if everything finally did crash, the top bosses would take one last does of the antitoxin and flee in a few hyperdrive space ships.
Ad astra! Sean
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