Opposition is organized in a clandestine cell organization called the Stephen Decatur Society. OK, I had to google Stephen Decatur but the Wikipedia article made interesting reading.
The first person narrator, a Colonel who is also a Decaturist, is arrested by the regime and turned into a triple agent. How this is done is quite horrible and I don't want to write about it here. Blog readers will either have read the story or can seek it out. I wondered about the significance of the title but that is explained near the end.
Our hero (?) meets the secretive Decaturist founder who advises him to read the Constitution of the United States. He does read it but too late, after he has assassinated the founder and summoned the police to arrest leading Decaturists.
He reads:
"We hold these Truths to be self-evident..." (p. 126)
Anderson continues the quotation for nearly a page. The point, I suppose, is that ideas exist but suppression of documents sure sets them back.
I would have preferred to end this post there but, for completeness, I must again make a comparison with Asimov. The latter also has a work, an entire novel, The Stars Like Dust, that ends when a character starts reading the Constitution. And, as always, I prefer Anderson's treatment, which, in this case, genuinely addresses the political realities of dictatorship and resistance to it.
5 comments:
Hi, Paul!
I agree, the means used by the secret police for turning the narrator of "The Pugilist" into their agent were ghastly. And, yes, Anderson wrote more convincingly than Asimov did about how ideas can survive into the future and remain influential.
Your comments about "The Pugilist" reminded me of Anderson's earlier story "The High Ones." That was an earlier speculation by him of what a Soviet dominated world might be like. To say nothing of the grim interest I had in Anderson's thoughts about how a totalitarian regime which lasted long enough could even lead to an intelligent race losing self awareness or self consciousness/intelligence.
Sean
Sean,
I am not familiar with Anderson's "The High Ones".
The phrase "the High Ones" is used in Heinlein's "By His Bootstraps" and I adapted it for one of my very few attempts at fiction in "Yossi, the Time Traveller", on my Logic of Time Travel blog.
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
You can find "The High Ones" in a paperback collection called THE HORN OF TIME (unless my memory is here erring).
Heinlein? I really should reread some of his earlier and better works, instead of letting my disappointment at how bad most of his later books were stop me from reading him.
Sean
Sean,
Thank you re THE HORN OF TIME.
The early Heinlein was good, of course, or he wouldn't have influenced Anderson!
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
And I would be interested if you made any comments comparing "The High Ones" with "The Pugilist." In a letter Anderson wrote in reply to my own letter, he wrote that he had been influenced in how he wrote "The High Ones" by Roderick Seidenberg's book POST HISTORIC MAN. Altho Anderson disagreed with Seidenberg, he was inspired by it to use or examine Seidenberg's ideas in "The High Ones."
Yes, the early Heinlein was good. I think THE MOON IS A HARSH MISTRESS is the only one of his later books which was interesting.
Sean
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