Lancaster Music Festival prevented me from rereading Poul Anderson's
Harvest Of Stars but not from repeatedly reflecting on the same author's Technic History for two days. Hence, the previous eight posts. Every other future history seems flat and linear by comparison. Of course, we are not always comparing like with like. Anderson's
Genesis is a single volume, not a series, and also is a very different kind of futuristic speculation. The Technic History began not as speculation but as space opera but then transformed its cliched setting of the Terran Empire into genuine discussion of civilizational cycles. The many extra-solar planets and their inhabitants are scientifically conceived and creatively imagined. Pulp magazine green monsters became a credible intelligent species with many histories and cultures. I still cannot get enough of the Technic History.
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
While I agree Anderson's Technic History has to be the single best SF "future history," I think some of the others are very much worth reading: Pournelle's Co-Dominium stories, Cordwainer Smith's Instrumentality of Mankind series, Wingrove's CHUNG KUO books (regrettably cancelled after eight volumes), etc.
And of course there's alternate universe "histories," such as Avram Davidson's stories about Dr. Engelbert Eszterhazy, or Stirling's Draka books.
Ad astra! Sean
Jerry's future history is certainly interesting, but it's also a demonstration that even the very intelligent and very well-informed are utterly lousy at predicting the future.
Jerry -- who I knew -- was convinced that the Soviet system (which he detested) could not be brought down by internal forces, even ones exacerbated from the outside. He knew a lot about it, both by study and because he had access to a lot of intelligence data from the spooks.
He and I disagreed on this and I was proven right... 8-).
Grand-political history is one of the -least- predictable parts of human existence because it is so dependent on the accidents of individual decisions and personalities.
Gorbachev was a wild card, for instance, who slipped through the system's cracks.
Maybe Gorbachev represented (far too late) something that was bound to come up eventually: a desperate attempt by the rigid system to "open up" purely in the interests of survival?
James Blish's CITIES IN FLIGHT had the US becoming a police state and thus being absorbed by the USSR.
Gorbachev did try to open it up; the problem was that this wasn't compatible with survival for the system, and he didn't see that because he genuinely (in a sense) believed in it. A cynic would probably have been more realistic.
In 1939, Stalin had all his top census bureau officials shot; he did it because they told him (correctly) that the USSR's population was declining, mainly because Stalin had killed so many of them.
High Stalinism wasn't sustainable in the most literal sense -- it was killing off the population that sustained it faster than they could breed. You can make a good argument that the Slavic nationalities of the USSR have never recovered their demographic vitality; of course, there was WWII as well.
When Stalin died, and Beria was shot after his attempted takeover, the 'nomenklatura' basically came to a set of agreements.
One was that they wouldn't kill each other any more; losers would be demoted, exiled to sheep-counting jobs in Uzbekistan or the embassy in Ulan Bator or the like, but not shot or sent to the Gulag.
The other was to moderate Stalin's mass terror. The nomenklatura would be exempt; ordinary people would still be repressed, but the mass millions-strong camps would be wound down, which they were.
This gave the nomenklatura a quiet life, and it eliminated some of the features that made High Stalinism unsustainable -- not killing off your own labor force, for instance.
But the reformed Stalinism wasn't sustainable either, because it was only the omnipresence of terror that made the system workable at all. It was the incentive to actually -do- things.
Without that lash, the bureaucracy increasingly ossified, avoiding change because it was too much like hard work, making statistics more and more fictional, increasing their direct financial corruption (though that had always been there to some extent).
So the whole system froze into stasis, exemplified by the steady aging at the top, until the whole Politburo were decrepit and senile.
And out in the boondocks, the behavior of Moscow's satraps became increasingly bizzare -- palaces in the desert in Central Asia, with orgies and personal enemies thrown to tigers to be eaten while the spectators cheered (I'm not kidding, this actually happened).
Mind you, National Socialism wold probably have decayed in even more spectacular style if they'd won -- Stalin killed more civilians than Hitler, but only because he ruled more for longer.
The NSDAP planned to revive actual chattel slavery, for example, on a large scale, and that was just for starters.
Hitler: "National Socialism."
Stalin: "Socialism in one country."
Tweedledum and Tweedledee.
Kaor, Paul!
Testing. That is a boiled down summary of Jonah Goldberg's view of both Marxist socialism and National Socialism in LIBERAL FASCIST, they have a lot in common (as well as some differences).
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I have time to comment. I agree grand political theory and analysis has shown itself notoriously defective as a predictor of how history will develop. I also agree, despite my liking for them, that Pournelle was wrong in his Co-Dominium stories to suggest the US and USSR would become allies. Because the latter did collapse due to internal strains.
Yes, the mass terror of Lenin and Stalin was simply not sustainable, esp. if it killed off so many of your armies and labor force. But the "reformed" Stalinism seen after Josip Vissarionovich died was also unsustainable. The USSR became an ossified, corrupt, and a peculiarly nasty oligarchy (I thought of those provincial satraps throwing enemies to hungry tigers).
Ad astra! Sean
And I think that the USSR bankrupted itself by stockpiling nuclear weapons. It literally lost a (Cold) War.
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think so. I think CONVENTIONAL military forces, such as those massive armies and huge numbers of tanks, were more costly.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
OK. Military spending in general, then.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Soviet forces were far larger than were needed for strictly defensive purposes. Because the Politburo never QUITE gave up the ambition of conquering the world. Not formally.
Ad astra! Sean
The Soviets accepted MAD in practice, but never in theory — both ideology and institutional inertia made that impossible for them.
Large conventional armies are more expensive than nuclear weapons, but they give you the illusion that you can do something other than engage in a suicide pact.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I thought so. Institutional inertia and their Marxist-Leninist ideology made it impossible for the Soviets to accept MAD in theory. Also, I have read of how the Moscow regime, for a long time,, took civil defense measures during a nuclear exchange very seriously. Which probably included both plans for hardening at risk targets and evacuating populations.
And to paraphrase what Old Nick said about Navy warships, the problem with them was how much CAPITAL they tied up. And that was even more true with those huge conventional Soviet forces.
Ad astra! Sean
About 25% of GDP, most years. As opposed to a maximum of about 9% in the US, usually more like 4 or 5. And the Soviet total was coming out of a smaller GDP and one with much lower Total Factor Productivity.
Lower TFP means that you have to commit more resources to get the same result.
Someone once defined Soviet economics as a system in which people were an intermediate good and tanks an end-product.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Among many other conclusions: command economies simply doesn't WORK very well. And the US economy would have been even more efficient if we hadn't gotten saddled with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society welfare programs (and their consequences).
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment