"This Means War!"

Poul Anderson's fiction often shows both the political causes and the immediate experience of warfare. In his Virgin Planet, women colonists of the planet Atlantis, who have reproduced by parthenogenesis for three hundred years, go to war when one man arrives!

The war happens not only because he is a male human being. He is also in sole control of a spaceship that has obvious military applications. But his maleness is also an issue. The "Doctors", effectively a priesthood, who control the parthenogenesis machine, resist his unwitting challenge to their power. And another group wants to monopolize his reproductive capacity in order to challenge the Doctors.

Thus, the Man must win a war in order first to recover his guarded spaceship and secondly to integrate this lost colony into interstellar civilization. While he watches the conflict:

"Davis felt sick. His whole culture was conditioned against war; it remembered too well how cities had gone up in radioactive smoke and barrenness crept stealthily over green hills." (p. 138)

The very first story in the series shows us the consequences in Europe of World War III.

Anderson shows us not only the political consequences of the man's arrival but also the individual responses of particular women - and, of course, the "Man"'s realization that being the only man on a planet of women is not the experience that he would have expected.

Also worthy of attention are Anderson's detailed imagining not only of the colonized planet but also of its complicated astronomical relationships to other bodies in its planetary system - and finally the fact that this novel fits seamlessly into a series also featuring the Stellar Union Coordination Service, the planet Nerthus and the science of psychotechnics. There are some references to this science in Virgin Planet despite my denial of this in an earlier post.