SOS II-III

I was mistaken in the previous post to say that Poul Anderson's "SOS," section II, (IN Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985, p. 205) presents an Asian viewpoint character. It describes Pitar Cheng, commander of the fleet that has captured the Farside station, but he is seen from the viewpoint of our already established central character, Ing Jans.

The title's significance emerges. From the station, Asian missiles will destroy the Westrealm space navy when it lands on Nearside soon. The problem for Jans becomes how to get an SOS message out of the station just as Dominic Flandry needs to smuggle a Mayday message from a colony planet in the similarly entitled "Mayday Orbit."

"SOS" presents three conflicts:

ideological - the collectivist and egalitarian Autarchism of Great Asia as against what a critic calls the "...neofeudal timocracy..." of the Westrealm (p. 195);

ecological - which system can respond more effectively to the imminent terrestrial magnetic field reversal which is expected to cause extinctions and mutations?;

personal: which system does Jans really support?

All this and the Lunar setting are a lot to convey in a few pages.

As in several of Anderson's puzzle stories, there comes a moment when our hero suddenly realizes what he must do:

"He stopped dead. A shudder went through his body, a shout through his brain." (p. 210)

- but the reader must not be told till later, when the battle has been won. Indeed, Jans must lie in order to conceal his realization from his captors.

But there is a twist in the tale. The Asians are defeated but meanwhile the terrestrial magnetic field has nosedived again and will last for another year at most... Jans' less alarmist approach to this issue was mistaken.