"Marius" was published in Astounding, June 1957 (see image).
The text displays the sensibility of an sf writer in its opening sentence:
"It was raining again, with a bite in the air as the planet spun toward winter." (p. 13)
Sf writers remember that we inhabit a planet even when they are not yet writing about travel between planets. That will happen in the next instalment.
There are two reasons to classify "Marius" as sf:
it is set in the near future, after World War III;
it postulates a scientific innovation - although the innovation is a predictive science of society, not a new gadget.
Apart from that, its soldiers fight with rifles, not with blasters, and they might as well be survivors of WWII. At the same time, there is also an indication that automation has advanced and is hastening the reconstruction.
Two more indications of the extent of the post-War devastation:
a very ill secretary works with files written on laundry bills, flyleaves and other scraps of paper;
an officer is still in his teens yet "...shrivelled into old age..." (p. 16)
When Fourre says that Europe is heading:
"'Toward war... Another nuclear war, fifty years hence.'" (p. 20)
- and adds:
"'It isn't certain the human race can survive that.'" (ibid.)
- nature responds accordingly:
"Rain stammered on the windowpanes, falling hard now, and wind hooted in the empty streets." (ibid.)
When nuclear war is mentioned, the rain changes from "thin" (p. 14) to hard and our old friend, the wind, adds its voice. Anderson writes the Pathetic Fallacy as naturally and easily as other authors write their grammar and punctuation.
How should we balance immediate (present) concerns against hypothetical (future) dangers? (Valti's symbolic sociology makes the future less hypothetical.) Anderson's works present two concrete statements of this dilemma.
First, Reinach, the titular "Marius," says:
"'...[Valti]'s senile now, I tell you. Babbling of the future, of long-range trends - Can we eat the future? People are dying of plague and starvation and anarchy now!'" (pp. 19-20)
"'You are theorizing about tomorrow... The rats are already here.'" (p. 23)
"'...hell take your misty futures! We'll meet the future when it gets here.'" (p. 24)
Fourre can only reply that Valti has instructed him in the elements of the new science and that it was theorists who discovered atomic energy.
Secondly, and in Anderson's second future history, the President of the Parliament of Man on Avalon complains:
"'...Give you military your heads, and you'd build bases in the fourth dimension to protect us against an invasion from the future.'"
-Poul Anderson, The People Of The Wind IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 437-662 AT p. 490.
- to which the First Marchwarden of the Lauran System replies:
"'We are always being invaded by the future... The next part of it to arrive will not be pleasant.'" (ibid.)
Nice one, Ferune!
Valti has a theory about "...the 'pivotal decision.'" (p. 21)
- to which Reinach responds, "'Bah!'" (ibid.)
Have you heard anyone say this? I heard a Maths teacher say it once. In any case, there may be, and probably are, pivotal decisions even in a timeline without a Time Patrol to guard them.
Fourre says that people in the mass do not learn. He cites the Hundred Years War and Hiroshima. People in his timeline had not learnt from Hiroshima. People in ours so far have. I find it remarkable that, despite all the stockpiling and posturing, the use of nuclear weapons has been avoided so far - since the US tested them on Japan.
Another inter-cosmic comparison:
"...[Fourre] had seen too many men spilling their guts on the ground and screaming." (p. 23)
"Everard...had seen men scream on the ground as blood and bowels spilled from them..." (The Shield Of Time, p. 74)
At the very end of "Marius," rain slants in through a broken window and we read Fourre's thoughts about his dead friend.
5 comments:
The background to that story is more or less taken from the aftermath of WWII and mixed in with stuff from the post-WW1 era in Russia and Eastern Europe (the predatory packs of feral children).
People tend to forget that things didn't leap from beat-up in 1945 to shiny and happy. Europe had been knocked flat, and there was hunger and rubble and despair from the Atlantic most of the way to the Urals. They called it "Year Zero" in Germany for a good reason.
Also, the war "ended" in some places but not in others, as had been true of WW1 -- conflicts spilling out of that kept the area between the Vistula and Afghanistan boiling (and blood) for a decade after 1918. Likewise in WW2, the fighting didn't stop in 1945 in many places; if you were a Greek, for example, or in India as WW2 segued into Partition.
Poul was closer to that, when he wrote "Marius", and always an acute observer.
Mr Stirling,
Thank you! Extremely informative.
Paul.
My own conviction, which IIRC Poul shared, was that nuclear weapons were what broke the cycle of the world wars, which otherwise would have continued with a WW3 sometime about 20 years after WW2 that wouldn't have ended until only one Great Power was left standing.
What WW1 and WW2 showed was that full-on total war was immensely destructive, but it "worked" in the sense that you could knock an enemy absolutely flat and survive yourself, even if badly damaged.
Industrialized nation-states in particular proved to be immensely tough beasts, capable of drawing on huge resources of both productivity and popular consent and endurance.
It also showed that this type of war would probably be settled by attrition and mass, rather than by military brilliance. (The Germans were better at actual fighting in both world wars, and lost, though by a narrow margin.)
The "peace of the mushroom cloud" altered the fundamental conditions which made this cycle possible, because a state which was capable of waging total industrialized war was inevitably also capable of producing nuclear weapons in quantity.
My father was in the (Canadian) military for a long time, and reported a Cold War era joke about NATO strategy in the event of Soviet attack. The strategy had three phases:
1) fight with conventional weapons until we start to lose;
2) fight with tactical nuclear weapons until we start to lose;
3) blow up the world.
And it worked rather well. The Soviet Union had massive superiority throughout the Cold War, but didn't attack... because we could blow up the world, and there's no point in a war that destroys the prize it's fought for.
There was probably a window in the late 1940's and early 1950's when war was still possible because there weren't that many nuclear weapons around and they weren't powerful enough to smash whole major cities at a single blow and the delivery systems were still rudimentary -- WW2-era bombers, pretty much.
My friend Harry Turtledove has done a good alternate-history story about the Korean War going worldwide that has a pretty accurate view of the possibilities.
"Marius" reflects about that stage of capabilities -- nuclear weapons powerful enough to do immense damage, but not to smash whole nations beyond repair in an afternoon.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
I agree that the coldly calculating realists of the Soviet Politburo were deterred from attempting the conquest of Europe and the US that, if driven to the wall, the US would strike back with ALL its nuclear weapons. Not much point in conquering the world if you were not going to be alive to rule it.
But, I can think of certain persons and groups who might not accept this kind of risk/benefit calculation: crazy despots and terrorist fanatics. What if someone like Kim Jong Un simply goes bonkers and actually detonates nukes in S Korea, Japan, or the US? Or terrorists like fanatical jihadists getting their hands on nukes to smuggle into the US and detonate?
I've not read it, but Tom Kratman speculated about what might happen using the second scenario in CALIPHATE.
Sean
Sean,
I think that Kim is posturing because he knows from recent history that dictators without nuclear weapons can be deposed so his aim is to maintain the status quo, including his own power, not to destroy it.
Paul.
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