Analyzing "Brake"

(The computer is not letting me add an image. Hopefully, this will be resolved soon.) (It has been.)

Analyzing Poul Anderson's "Brake" has been an interesting experience. We discern three elements:

the interminable fight sequence in the spaceship;

the eventual explanation that does give this story a role in the Psychotechnic History;

the technical problem in the concluding section.

When the problem is solved, there is a sense of satisfaction or completion but not as much as if the story had focused on the problem from the beginning. The narrative has rambled to its conclusion.

The three elements of the story could have been treated separately. Anderson was writing against the background of a future history time chart. We want to know more about Terrestrial society at the time and about the Western Reformist conspirators who try to hijack the spaceship and who thus initiate the violence that occupies most of the story.

Having, I think, exhausted this story for the time being, should we stay with the Psychotechnic History or move on to other works?

Ways To Die On Jupiter

Jupiter is visited in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic, Technic and Flying Mountains future histories and in his independent novel, Three Worlds To Conquer. (Three Worlds... has a marginal future historical element because its events occur after the "Sam Hall" revolution described in the short story of that name.)

The problem is always how to survive in the hostile Jovian environment. In "Brake," should a spaceship that needs to decelerate make braking ellipses in the Jovian atmosphere? Arguably not: in that thick and turbulent atmosphere, an already damaged ship would not have enough control to compute its exit orbit so there would be insufficient time to inform the rescue boats before the ship had reentered the atmosphere.

Crashing on the surface would be fatal because the atmosphere is hydrogen and helium at one hundred and forty degrees Absolute. But there would be no time to breathe because the ship would be "'...spattered on the surface...'" (Cold Victory, p. 272) But the ship would not even reach the surface because it would be squashed by Jupiter's tens of thousands of atmosphere's pressure.

The solution is to lighten the ship so that it can float in the lighter upper atmosphere until rescued. Because of Jupiter's massive gravity, the air thins out with height more slowly so there is a deeper layer of thin air for the braking ellipses. We realized that, didn't we?

The Technical Problem

Continued from here.

"Since men first steered a scraped-out log or a wicker basket to sea, it had been an agony for a captain to lose his ship." (Cold Victory, p. 276)

Here again is the comparison of space travel with sea travel. We see the first scraped-out log in Poul Anderson's "The Long Remembering."

Anderson's Time Patrol series recognizes a progression from sea to space to time travel - and time travelers interact with Tyrian seamen.

The problem:

on a hyperbolic orbit, the ship will leave the Solar System and does not have enough reaction mass to decelerate;

they are out of their own radio range to anywhere;

over such great distances, any high-acceleration ships sent in search of the lost "Thunderbolt" will not be able to compute its orbit accurately;

jettisoning everything non-essential will not slow them enough;

they can use Jupiter's gravity to throw themselves into a cometary orbit but such an orbit will take several years to bring them back into radio range of anyone and they only have a few weeks' supply of food;

the spacecraft of the Jovian Republic are too obsolete to match their velocity.

So what is the answer?

The End Of The Fighting

Continued from here:

in order to wreck the ship, Gomez is flushing out the reaction mass;

while Tokugawa and Nielsen distract Gomez with noise at the other end of the bulkhead, Banning's gang burns through near the skin of the ship;

Banning and Vladimirovitch step through the bulkhead into an outer room with a door to the engine room;

hearing Banner enter, Gomez turns while drawing his gun;

Banning fires but misses;

when Gomez fires, recoil sends him backwards;

Banning, while pursuing, orders Vlad to stop the pump;

Gomez fires repeatedly but to no immediate effect in free fall;

Banning aims, fires and hits Gomez on the second attempt;

shot through the heart, Gomez dies but Vlad realizes that too much reaction mass has been lost.

Now all the bad guys are dead. This is a relief. The extended fight has lasted for forty two pages. The captain, the first and second mates, four crewmen and two passengers have survived the hostilities but must now learn how to survive in a spaceship with insufficient reaction mass. They have about fifteen pages left. They now face a purely technical problem, what CS Lewis called "the Engineer's story." At last we have merely a hard sf question dealing only with masses, orbits, the Jovian atmosphere (as in one "Flying Mountains" story) etc. We can trust Poul Anderson's characters to cope.

Two Moments Of Realization

For discussion of Andersonian moments of realization, see here.

In "Holmgang"
"Orbital velocity equals escape velocity divided by the square root of two.
"For a moment he lay there, rigid..."
-Poul Anderson, Cold Victory (New York, 1982), p. 160.

I did not know that about orbital velocity and that is the sort of technical detail that I usually read past without noticing it. This is the moment when the hero of this story realizes that he can fight his armed enemy on a small asteroid by flying right around the asteroid and attacking him from behind. Orbital velocity...

The view point character going rigid immediately after thinking about his situation is a sure sign to regular Anderson readers that the solution to the current problem has just been recognized but also that we will not be told what that solution is until we are shown its implementation.

In "Brake"
"Banning groaned. Per Jovem, it was too much to ask of a man!
"And then he stiffened.
"'What is it, sir?' Nielsen looked alarmed.
"'By Jupiter,' said Banning. 'Well, by Jupiter!'
"'What?'
"'Never mind. Come on.'" (p. 263)

This is quite explicit. They have a problem while they are approaching Jupiter. Banning will somehow use Jupiter to solve the problem but he will not tell his crewman, and therefore will not tell the reader either, how he is going to do it. And I do not remember, despite having read this story more than once before. Maybe posting a summary of the story's conclusion will help to fix it in memory.

Back To The Fighting

Continued from here:

approaching the bridge, Banning and his companions are fired at by Gentry, who had shot open the door and is bracing himself against it while covering those inside;

when Banning's group have taken cover, Gentry agrees to parley with Devon who, however, emerging from cover, launches himself towards Gentry in the zero gravity;

Gentry non-fatally wounds Devon with a bullet but is then fatally wounded by knives thrown by Banning;

(a bullet is less harmful in free fall because the target bounces away from it and Devon presented his chest so that the bones could act as armor);

Gomez, still in the engine room, gives them an hour to surrender before he wrecks the ship;

Devon, briefly revived from his coma, at last explains that Gomez and co are Western Reformists - Andreyev was an Engineer expelled from the Order and the "non-political" Order's Intelligence arm knew in general of the Reformists' plans.

So now we have another cliff-hanger as Banning and his men must respond to the threat from Gomez.

The Politics Behind All The Fighting

I am determined to continue and complete the serial summary of the sequence of fight scenes in Poul Anderson's "Brake." However, I have at last come across the reason behind the fighting.

As I said before, the Solar Union period of Anderson's Psychotechnic History divides into a "social" trilogy and a "political" tetralogy. The "social" stories are, respectively, pre-Humanist, post-Humanist and extrasolar. The "political" stories feature:

Humanist conspirators with an asteroid base;
a Humanist Dictator on Earth;
psychotechnic conspirators on Callisto and Ganymede;
Western Reformist conspirators with an asteroid base (in "Brake").

The Western Reformists want to hijack a spaceship in order to supply their base. "Holmgang" and The Snows Of Ganymede had told us that opposition to Western technic society emanated from Asia. Now, this Oriental opposition has crystallized around Kali worship, which has even spread to North America and has generated its own opponents, the puritanical, pro-technological Western Reformists. Western Terrestrial women are described as "...crop-headed, tight-lipped, sad-clad..." (Cold Victory, p. 233) We really needed a "social" story set on Western Earth during this period, not an interminable fight sequence grudgingly explaining itself after thirty four pages of text. (The fact that the ship is temporarily in free fall affects the movements of the combatants and their use of guns but otherwise there was no reason for these long passages to be sf.)

However, "Brake" does complete the account of social degeneration on Earth. When Banning suddenly starts talking about Terrestrial ideological conflicts (p. 234), it sounds like an arbitrary mishmash of labels but it does make sense that the failures first of the Psychotechnic Institute, then of the Humanist Dictatorship, would lead to an irreconcilable polarization along the lines laid out in this story.

As with all of Anderson's works, there is more than we expect to be found in the Psychotechnic History when we delve beneath its surface.

Continuing "Brake"

Continued from here:

arming themselves with knives from the galley, Banning and Togukawa proceed to crew quarters where they see and attack Andreyev who is armed and guarding a locked cabin door;

Andreyev fires his gun but cannot aim in zero gravity and is knocked backwards by recoil;

used to moving in zero gravity, Banning follows;

the recoil from a second, closer, shot throws Andreyev onto a wall from which he rebounds onto Banning's knife;

in revenge for Tietjens and O'Farrell, Banning stabs again, making sure that Andreyev is dead;

Togukawa shouts a warning and, with Andreyev's gun, shoots the cabin door open;

he recoils but knows how to handle it;

Devon, Nielsen, Bahadur, Castro and Vladimirovitch emerge from the cabin;

Banning informs them that they must still fight Gomez and Gentry, who control the engine room and all but one of the guns.

To be continued...

On previous readings, I retained just a confused image of a lot of fighting and killing in a spaceship.

(A linquistic aside: In The Snows Of Ganymede, Planetary Engineers visiting Ganymede are served a meal not by four armed men but by four-armed men. What a difference to the meaning a single hyphen can make.)

More Fight Scenes En Route To Jupiter

Continued from the previous post:

Banning activates fire extinguishers so that Gentry must struggle with plastifoam lather;

Banning and his two companions join first mate Tetsuo Tokugawa, who is from Luna, on the bridge;

monitoring key points on a screen, Banning sees one of the two stewards, Tietjens, dead from a shot to the head;

next he sees, in the engine room, Professor Gomez, a passenger en route to the University of X on Ganymede;

Gomez, claiming to have killed another crew member called O'Farrell, says that he and his associates are taking over the ship and have already taken prisoner everyone except the four on the bridge and that Banning had killed Falken;

however, Gomez refuses to divulge their purpose so we are still no wiser;

breaking off contact with Gomez, Banning discloses in conversation on the bridge that the prisoners must be another steward, two engineers and a deckhand;

on Banning's order, Tokugawa stops the ship's spin;

leaving Wayne and Cleonie on the bridge, Banning and Tokugawa set off to fight Gomez and co.

So who is on the ship?

Captain Banning;
Engineer Devon;
Andreyev;
Cleonie;
Falken (dead);
Gentry;
second mate Wayne;
first mate Togugawa;
Gomez;
steward Tietjens (dead);
O'Farrell (dead);
a second steward;
two engineers;
a deckhand.

That does add up to the fifteen mentioned by Devon. But what it is all about we still have no idea.

Too Many Fight Scenes

So far in Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, which I am rereading:

Humanists have conspired against, then overthrown, Psychotechnicians;

the cabal and the Solar Union have overthrown the Humanists;

Psychotechnicians have conspired, unsuccessfully, to regain power.

In "Brake," someone conspires to do something but I cannot remember who or what so I am rereading the story but it is one in which action scenes take center stage for far too long. On the Fireball spaceship, "Thunderbolt":

the Minerals Authority representative, Sergei Andreyev, holds the Planetary Engineer, Luke Devon, at gun-point in a ship's corridor;

Captain Peter Banning knocks out Andreyev;

Devon goes for a steward but does not return;

Cleonie Rogers, tourist, joins Banning, who is standing over Andreyev;

Robert Falken, a nucleonic technician en route to a job on Callisto, runs towards them;

Banning, suspicious of Falken, warns him off but then Andreyev, who has revived, attacks Banning;

Banning fights off Andreyev but is then attacked by Falken who grabs his gun;

Cleonie attacks Falken;

Banning fights off Falken and retrieves his fallen gun but then Morgan Gentry, astronaut en route to a piloting job in the Jovian Republic, approaches and fires at Banning;

Banning, carrying Cleonie, runs up some stairs and collides with second mate Charles Wayne;

still fired at by the pursuing Gentry, Banning orders Wayne to carry Cleonie to the bridge and then follows them...

This has taken thirteen pages and the reader still does not know what is going on, except that Devon had recognized Andreyev under some surgical changes. I will persevere because I am interested in what the bad guys are conspiring about.

The Solar Union: Physics And Politics

The climax of Poul Anderson's "Holmgang" is a neat solution to a technical problem: how to fight an armed man on a small asteroid? Solution: use one of your air tanks to propel yourself right around the asteroid so that you can smash into his back. Similarly, "Brake" also builds towards the solution to a technical problem: how to decelerate a spaceship on a hyperbolic orbit and with insufficient reaction mass? Solution: jettison non-essentials and brake by skimming the Jovian atmosphere until the ship can float in the atmosphere and await rescue.

However, I am currently rereading these Psychotechnic History installments not for their hard sf but for their information on the political opposition to the Solar Union. "Holmgang" tells us that the Humanists have an asteroid base and plan a military uprising. Why?

A Humanist argues that:

three ideologically motivated World Wars ruined Earth;
therefore, populations emotionally reacted against ideology in favor of reason;
by applying reason, scientists produced goods, machines, space travel, new food sources, new cures for old diseases and a workable plan for socioeconomic unity;
however, this New Enlightenment has created new practical problems that it cannot solve;
these are mass unemployment on Earth and cultural resistance both from Asia and from the extra-planetary colonies;
the psychotechs are making enemies by responding oligarchically and unconstitutionally to these insoluble problems created by themselves.

Before we continue to discuss Solar Union politics, let me quote a speculative passage from The Snows Of Ganymede (New York, 1958), Chapter 4:

"Seen from space, Ganymede was bleaker than Luna herself - seamed with mountains, pocked with craters, mottled light and dark over her sterile face." (p. 21)

This story was originally published in 1954. Now we have close up photos of Ganymede (see image). Anderson described it before we saw it.

Brotherhood And Order

In Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History, another force for order is the Order of Planetary Engineers, which even thwarts a plot by the discredited and exiled psychotechnicians. Appropriately, "Brake," the last story set in the pre-interstellar period, features an Engineer who is also a Rostomily Brother. The Brotherhood had disbanded three centuries previously (the Chronology seems to be wrong on this point) but the Order must have kept some of the cells.

However, the fact that humanity is only three decades away from the Second Dark Ages is sufficient proof that the UN attempt to build a single sane world civilization has failed. Instead of uniting, Earth is split between Oriental Kali worshipers and Occidental protechnological puritans. The latter sound like a legacy of the earlier Pilgrims. Complicating matters further:

the Kali worshipers are only one branch of the Ramakrishian Eclectics;
there are pro-Technic Asians and Kali-worshiping Americans;
there are also Husseinite Moslems and a New Christendom.

Earth is in a mess. A spaceship captain consoles himself by reflecting:

"Thank all kindly gods that there were men on other planets now! The harvest of all the patient centuries since Galileo would not be entirely lost, whatever happened to Earth."
-Poul Anderson, Cold Victory (New York, 1982), p. 234.

And, indeed, the rest of the Psychotechnic History is about humanity outside the Solar System with only two brief passages set back on Earth.