The Ship

"The Troublemakers."

Evan Friday thinks:

"Couldn't they see - damn them couldn't they see that the ship was bigger than all their stupid ambitions, couldn't they see that space was the great Enemy, against which all souls aboard, all mankind had to unite?" (p. 111)

Change one word, "ship," to "planet" and you describe our condition.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, mankind has two enemies, external and internal: nature (or space) and itself. See Space And Nature. Pulp sf addresses basic issues.

Fictional Futures

Fiction reflects life. I am reading about violence in Poul Anderson's "The Troublemakers" and seeing it on the TV news. Fiction becomes more vivid when dramatized. In a superhero film watched with Andrea, bombed buildings burned and did not look any different from the TV news. Sf authors can write dystopias, utopias and business as usual futures. Apparent utopias that turn out to be dystopias are a valid sub-genre but do not have to be the only kind of utopias! Sf writers could also contribute how society might get it right in future. Anderson's "Wingless" and "Rescue on Avalon" show the peaceful biracial colonization of Avalon. Unfortunately, of course, there is conflict later but not between human and Ythrian Avalonians. Better worlds are possible.

Post-Nuclear War Timelines

Poul Anderson's main fictional futures set after a nuclear war:

the Psychotechnic History

the Maurai History

Twilight World (almost a future history)

Vault Of The Ages

Shield

The Psychotechnic History begins in the immediate aftermath of World War III. Are we living in the prelude to it? If so, then we need to heed this warning:

"...in strictly pragmatic terms, the early atomic era was the best time to resolve East-West rivalry; the crude weapons of that day could not sterilize Earth."

-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League (Riverdale, NY, October 2017), p. 3.

Or might the powers that be escalate local conflicts into a third global conflict while maintaining their tacit agreement not to deploy nukes? Thus, replay WWII: invade Poland, occupy France, besiege Britain, draw in the Americans, but without nuking anyone?

The Psychotechnic History includes "'What if World War III had not happened'?' fiction. Thus, a fictional timeline tangentially comments on the Earth Real timeline.

Longevity And FTL

In James Blish's Cities In Flight, both longevity and faster-than-light are regarded as necessary for interstellar travel. In Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, it makes sense when the long-lived Howard Families hijack the second generation ship. They are naturals for interstellar travel. And one of them is a genius who invents an FTL drive en route.

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History:

immortality is developed on Earth but is a dead end;

a generation ship takes six generations to reach Alpha Centauri;

FTL is developed later.

In haste. Off to visit Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop. Back here later today maybe.

In The Barracks

"The Troublemakers."

In a male barracks, a large telescreen shows:

"...the mindless, tasteless sort of program intended for this class..." (p. 96)

The crew of an interstellar spaceship has been divided into socioeconomic classes with mindless, tasteless entertainment provided for the lowest class. On Earth, such social divisions developed and occurred for historical and economic reasons although it became possible to move beyond them. In the Pioneer, the divisions can only have been planned by people who knew what they were doing and it surprises me that apparently no one in the crew realizes this.

When I first read this story, I accepted that it was about a future society but it is a society in a spaceship which has been in flight for only eighty years, not for centuries, and which was designed and constructed with different kinds of accommodation and cultural provision for the different ranks. During rereading, my willing suspension of disbelief is strained.

There could, of course, have been a future historical sub-series entirely about the six generations within the spaceship followed by a sequel about the colonization of a planet of Alpha Centauri but the Psychotechnic History includes only this single story about the Pioneer in mid-flight. Poul Anderson would have needed an indefinitely prolonged lifetime to follow up every implication of his several future histories.

Brawls But Not Riots

"The Troublemakers."

In the generation ship, the Pioneer, Evan Friday has been reduced from officer to crewman. He learns from a policeman that the police cannot prevent brawls but must, of course, stop riots. Riots! Friday is advised not to complain if he is beaten up because this might lead to him being murdered. This cannot be the way to run a spaceship! All that these generations of crewmen are doing is transmitting their genes to Alpha Centauri. There have to be better ways to do that.

Out of officer territory, halls are drabber and dingier while apartments are "...smaller and poorly furnished..." (p. 95) None of this is necessary. It has been socially engineered. Unmarried workers live in barracks. Many of the crew curse and spit after policemen. How have such social divisions and attitudes grown up inside a spaceship in just four generations? Drabber halls, smaller apartments and barracks have all been physically and sociologically designed for a purpose. Surely at least some of the people there realize that? And also that the expedition could have been conducted on an entirely different basis?

Friday's Accusations

"The Troublemakers."

The Pioneer has been in flight for 80 years.

Gomez has been captain for 43 years.

Evan Friday is 24.

Friday will be 67 when the Pioneer reaches Alpha Centauri. 

Found guilty of sedition, Friday says that he has been framed and then makes a list of accusations:

mismanagement

selfishness

treachery

venality

tyrannies

revolutions

tensions

hatreds

corruptions

social evils

power struggles

oppression

officers, a tyrant caste

crew, an ignorant mob

If he has been saying all this, then someone will have called it "sedition"!

It will eventually be disclosed that all of this was allowed to happen as the only way of getting seven thousand people to Alpha Centauri. An ignorant mob! They are being manipulated instead of being given the knowledge and understanding to enable them to manage their own lives and their voyage to Alpha Centauri. Psychotechnics ought to be about that.

123 Years

Poul Anderson, "The Troublemakers" IN Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 2 (Riverdale, NY, February 2018), pp. 91-138.

"Centenarians were not uncommon these days. But very few reached 150. Nobody reached 200."

-"What Shall It Profit?," p. 79.

At the beginning of "The Troublemakers," Enrico Yamatsu states in his Starward! that:

the Pioneer, launched in 2126, will take 123 years to reach Alpha Centauri;

that this means five or six generations;

that it is longer than a long lifetime.

I would call it six generations, taking one generation as about twenty years, enough time for someone to be born and to become a young adult. If some people, however few, are reaching 150, then 123 years is shorter than a long lifetime. A baby, taken into the Pioneer before its launch could reach Alpha Centauri. Just. But there would still be six generations born in the ship. If such a ship were ever to be launched, then far better arrangements would have to be made for the lives, activities and sanities of its crew. Many would have to be scientists, their attention directed outwards, studying the universe as the ship passed through it. There would have to be libraries, audiovisual entertainment and virtual realities (if possible). The way the ship is organized and socially divided seems crazy to me.

Flaw?

Describing a multi-generational interstellar spaceship, Sandra Miesel writes:

"...whatever hopes the crew may have cherished of escaping social turmoil faded en route."

-Sandra Miesel IN Poul Anderson, The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume " (Riverdale, NY, February 2018), p. 90.

And why was that? Miesel continues:

"Being human, they still carried the trait for conflict within them like an uncorrectable genetic flaw." (ibid.)

No, they did not. Or, to speak more scientifically, that was not put the test. I write now from memories of having read "The Troublemakers" more than once before. About to reread it, I will be able to look out for any details previously missed or not remembered although tomorrow rereading will be interrupted by my monthly visit to Andrea above the Old Pier Bookshop when we watch superhero films and discuss the world.

For now, from memory: the planners of the interstellar voyage applied psychodynamics. They deliberately divided the crew into social groups and classes with different powers, privileges, inequalities, deprivations etc. The idea was that this situation would generate resentments, conflicts and power grabs but that these would be manageable, thus preventing the kind of all-destructive Mutiny that had happened in Robert Heinlein's earlier generation ship.

Maybe so. But, since conflict was deliberately built into the social structure of the Pioneer, it makes no sense to suggest that a "trait for conflict" was present in any case. Maybe it was. Maybe it wasn't. No one tried to find out. A crew could have been selected, their activities could have been planned and much more harmonious relationships could have been established from the outset. If, then, conflict nevertheless broke out, a team of psychodynamicists within the crew would have been able to learn something about what went wrong and why. Any "traits" could have been identified, not just assumed.

To cause conflict and then to say that that conflict was inevitable in any case would be one massive ideological preconception, non sequitur and example of circular reasoning.

Murderous Rage

Poul Anderson, "What Shall It Profit?" IN The Complete Psychotechnic League, Volume 2 (Riverdale, February 2018), pp. 73-89.

A small number of human beings can be prevented from aging but only if, starting from the earliest moments of their exogenetic conceptions, they have been kept shielded from all radiation in an enclosed space surrounded by an otherwise impossibly strong magnetic field deep underground. Yet the state of society and the strength of anti-scientific feeling are such that, if it were publicly disclosed that even this limited form of immortality existed, then many people would assume that immortality without any restrictions could and should be made instantly available to all but was being withheld by the scientific elite:

"'These days the knowledge would whip men into a murderous rage of frustration; they wouldn't believe the truth, they wouldn't dare believe, and God alone knows what they'd do.'" (p. 87)

In Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children, a much more enlightened public responds in the same way. The long-lived Howard Families are persecuted for not revealing their supposed secret and are driven into exile. Then an urgent research program does discover a completely unrelated way to extend lifespans indefinitely.

Poul Anderson does not tell us the fate of his troglodyte immortals but it is certain that they will not survive the Second Dark Ages.