Jones' Doubts

The audience for any fictional series becomes used to a set of continuing characters interacting against a common background. By the time we start to read the interlude between the concluding two stories in Poul Anderson's and Gordon R Dickson's Earthman's Burden (New York, 1979), we have become used to the idea that plenipotentiary Alexander Jones and his wife Tanni have represented the Interbeing League on the planet Toka for over ten years.

One way to generate drama in an installment of a series is to imply an imminent and fundamental change to some aspect of this familiar set-up - that the central character is about to resign or retire, for example. The interlude is a letter from Jones in which he says that he has not yet reached a definite decision about whether to resign but that, pending the result of an inspection, he "...shall very probably step aside..." (p. 157). This letter strikes a reflective note by contrast with the humor that is the main theme of the series - and it is appropriate that characters in a comedy are occasionally presented more seriously as when contemplating their future careers.

Jones doubts the value of the Cultural Development Service. He asks whether their work "...is only a subtler form of the old, discredited imperialism of Earth's brutal past?" (p. 156) As Anderson argues in other series, because each planet is economically self-sufficient, interstellar economic imperialism is both impossible and unnecessary. I think that this alone saves the CDS from rerunning British imperialism. There is nothing "brutal" about Jones' relationship with the Hokas.

But he goes on to expound his question differently:

"Have I merely been turning my wards into second-rate humans, instead of first-rate Hokas?" (ibid.)

This would be cultural imperialism. The question is complicated by the fact that a first-rate Hoka is precisely one who enacts an imported culture instead of developing his own. For this reason and no other, Jones has helped the Hokas, for example, to transform a Tokan island into "England" complete with London and rural shires.

Often, in a series, the drama of an episode is resolved as the fundamental change is prevented. In one episode of The Prisoner, the title character escapes and gets all the way back to London but winds up at the end of the episode back in the Village. Since there are two further Hoka volumes and since also I expect the narrative framework to remain much the same, I do not expect Jones to resign his post at the end of this first volume.