Reading this story, we look out for future historical background details and find some. The UN had formed a world government. Now Venus, although not Mars, has broken from it. The tank for travelling on the Venerian surface is compared to a Martian sandcat which we saw in "Un-Man." In that story, discoveries derived from native Martian hibernation might enable the military to pack spaceships with soldiers in cold sleep. In "The Big Rain," that application has come closer and might be deployed against Venus.
On Venus, essentials are issued without payment but ration sizes depend on rank. Money from incentive bonuses is for inessentials. Everything is government property. Hollister reflects that the system is communist although not called that and probably has to be, given the small economic surplus. On the one hand, he does not criticize the internal arrangements of another society and, like most people on Earth, no longer makes:
"...a god of a particular economic set-up." (I, p. 167)
On the other hand, he thinks that something ugly is brewing on Venus. The system could make a virtue of a necessity and become unnecessarily oppressive. Hollister senses that the Venerians already fear their "Guardians."
If the government controls production, then why cannot the population control the government? Well, in any case, it does not. Entry to the government requires several rigid tests, followed by years of apprenticeship and study of history, psychotechnics and physical sciences.
"...in principle, thought Hollister, remembering some of the blubberheads who still got themselves elected at home, a good idea." (p. 168)
I have heard this seriously suggested as preferable to elections. Another suggestion is an extra voting option, NOTA, meaning "none of the above." A majority for NOTA would necessitate another election with different candidates.
In any case, Hollister, although not a Rostomily Brother, is another Un-man who has come to Venus to overthrow a dictatorship. In some kinds of fiction, one man can do this in sixty five pages.
Simplifying, fictional Venuses were wet or dry. Needless to say, Poul Anderson wrote both. This one is dry, thus closer to Venus Real.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
"The Big Rain," first pub. in 1954, is another of Anderson's early stories, written when he was still a "flaming liberal." The story contains ideas about economics and politics that he moved away from or rejected. Such as any kind of socialism and the kind of autocracy such a system needs to "work."
It does not follow that if everything is owned by the state then the "population" at large should control the gov't. Hard actual experience has shown that all you will get from such a regime is a centralized, one party bureaucratic despotism.
I remember how, the first time I read "The Big Rain," the story did not interest me. I thought it rather clunky and slow moving. However, the next time I read it, I found the story more interesting.
Ad astra! Sean
The reason 'the people' can't control the government is that government is necessarily hierarchical and based on a monopoly of force.
Human beings compete for power. Hunter-gatherers do it, we do it, it's like breathing.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Absolutely! You stated more clearly what I was trying to say. I get so FRUSTRATED with dreamy, well meaning types who stubbornly refuse to face the hard facts about human beings and their societies.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: the problem with lack of realism is that it gets in the way of accomplishing what's possible.
As the saying goes, if you try for heaven on earth, you get hell instead.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And that has been exactly what's been happening since the French Revolution! Instead of the kindly, well meaning Louis XVI we got Robespierre, the horrors of the Reign of Terror, and the dictatorship of Napoleon. The HIDEOUS Russian Revolution replaced the well meaning Nicholas II with the monstrous Lenin, the Red Terror, and the Gulags. And on and on with a long list of fanatically bloody revolutionaries and monster tyrants.
It's so hard for any nation or society being not TOO bad. To demand an impossible Utopian perfection is far more likely to end with horrors like the examples I cited.
Ad astra! Sean
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