Manuel, Strategist And Technician II

"The Star Plunderer."

To wage war is to try to kill the enemy but a commander is also directly responsible for deaths on his own side. He attacks, maybe, if he thinks that he will lose 20% but not if he thinks that he will lose 80%. He sends some men to their deaths so that others can advance. I think that King David deliberately killed a man by sending him into the front line?

The Gorzuni guard their armory with a portable shield that deflects blaster bolts. Manuel orders Reeves to lead a direct charge so that he can lead a smaller group using zero gravity to soar above the enemies' heads. Is Manuel doing a David by trying to eliminate Kathryn's fiancee? Whatever his motives, he has to decide instantly. Reeves is the best man to lead the charge.

Reeves says, "'Like hell!'" (p. 3532, then obeys the order:

"...I swallowed rage and fear and lifted a shout to the men. I'm no braver than anyone else but there is an exaltation in battle, and Manuel used it as calculatingly as he used everything else." (pp. 352-353)

Most of Reeve's men die but Manuel's attack succeeds.

Manuel, Strategist And Tactician

There is wisdom not only in the Technic History but also in other fictional realms.

Manuel, an accomplished organizer, reminds us of van Rijn:

"I did notice Manuel exchange a few words in the slave pen with Ensign Hokusai, who had been captured with Kathryn and myself. Someone had to lead the humans, and Hokusai was the best man for that job. But how had Manuel known? It was part of his genius for understanding."
-"The Star Plunderer," pp. 346-347.

Manuel has managed to pre-arrange one detail of the mutiny with Kathryn without even her fiancee, Reeves, knowing.

"And by now few of the humans expected to live or cared much about much of anything except killing Gorzuni. Manuel had timed it right." (p. 352)

The artificial gravity in the ship is Gorzunian which is twice Terrestrial but Manuel switches it off, thus removing the Gorzuni's advantage and instead advantaging the Solar Navy men with free-fall training. Manuel and Reeves soar into combat like superheroes:

"Then we were pushing off and soaring out the door and into the corridor beyond. Praise all gods, the Commonwealth navy had at least given its personnel free-fall training." (p. 350)

In the lower gravity of Barsoom, John Carter effectively has a superpower. He can leap above the head of a twelve-foot green Martian and lop his head off with a sword. Superman, from the heavier planet Krypton, was originally able to leap a tall building with a single bound, not to fly! But Manuel's men fly in zero gravity.

Reeves praises all gods. James Blish's Okies invoke gods of all stars but that is a different future history.

Manuel, Theoretician

We have appreciated the wisdom of Nicholas van Rijn, (see also T'Kelan Psychology and Habeas Corpus) Chunderban Desai and even Dominic Flandry:

Flandry's Testament
The Wisdom Of Flandry

- so what might we learn from Manuel Argos, Founder of the Terran Empire?

He has to be a heartless bastard because:

"'...everyone else chooses to be brainless. These aren't times for the tender-minded, you. This is an age of dissolution and chaos, such as has often happened in history, and only a person who first accepts the realities of the situation can hope to do much about them. We don't live in a cosmos where perfection is possible or even desirable. We have to make our compromises and settle for the goals we have some chance of attaining.'"
-"The Star Plunderer," pp. 345-346.

No one chooses brainlessness. Can the stupid choose to be intelligent? Manuel seems to have an intuitive grasp of Desai's theory. Perfection impossible? Empirically, maybe so. The Buddha taught "unsatisfatoriness." But perfection not desirable? We would not even desire to read a perfect sf novel? Surely this is a contradictory statement?

Storm The Stars

That phrase, "...stormed the stars..." (see An Ancient Hell) rang a bell. When Everard asked Raor what the Exaltationists would have done with the universe:

"The glorious head lifted. Pride rang. 'We would have made it what we chose, and unmade it and remade it, and stormed the stars as we warred for possession, with an entire reality the funeral pyre of each who fell and entire histories the funeral games, until the last god reigned alone.'
"Desire blew out of him on a winter wind."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART TWO, 209 B.C., p. 118.

As often in Anderson's texts, the wind comments. I always like to find parallels between the Technic History and the Time Patrol.

(The Times Editor has just commented that the power and pomp of the Presidency will meet the regal ritual of royalty. Any appropriate alternative alliterations?)

An Ancient Hell

"The Star Plunderer."

"They herded us aboard a tender after dark. It was like a scene from some ancient hell -..." (p. 330)

This hell is night, scores of houses burning like torches and guards kicking stumbling prisoners.

Later, on the ship, the three rebel leaders, having killed several Gorzuni, stolen their guns and switched off the anti-gravity and the lights, are about to free the male slaves:

"...I could dimly see the tangle of free-floating naked bodies churning and screaming in the vast gloom. A scene from an ancient hell. The fall of the rebel angels. Man, child of God, had stormed the stars and been condemned to Hell for it.
"And now he was going to burst out!" (p. 351)

I was interested in the repetition of "scene from an ancient hell." Epic poetry, originally oral, relied on repetition of phrases like Homer's "wine-dark sea." (I think that some sword and sorcery authors also repeat phrases, e.g., about "ichor"?) Anderson practices repetition to epic effect. His phrase, "The fall of the rebel angels...," echoes another epic, John Milton's Paradise Lost.

Bleak Glory

"The Star Plunderer."

"The ship wallowed on her way, through a bleak glory of stars, alone in light-years of emptiness with her cargo of hate and fear and misery and dreams. We worked, and waited, and the slow days passed." (p. 344)

This passage is notable as an early use of Poul Anderson's phrase, "glory of stars," but with the antithetical adjective, "bleak," added to match the hate, fear and misery inside the Gorzuni slaver ship.

Can a spaceship "wallow"? Maybe, when its "assistant" engineer, Manuel Argos, has deliberately sabotaged the engines and equipment and made his captors think that only his constant work keeps the ship going. With Reeves and Kathryn as his assistants, he might be able to take over the ship. Then, given the right leadership - Manuel - humanity should be able to expel the Baldics from the Solar System and overrun their home planets.

After many installments set during the period of the Solar Commonwealth, events are now moving very fast in a single short story. Volume III, Rise Of The Terran Empire, is the major turning point of the seven-volume The Technic Civilization Saga.

Planetary Contrast

"The Star Plunderer."

Here is a short descriptive passage that need not have been in this space opera but immeasurably enhances it:

"The engines began to thrum. Under way, outward bound to the ice mountains of Gorzun, no more to see blue skies and green grass, no clean salt smell of ocean and roar of wind in tall trees. Now we were slaves and had nothing to do but wait." (p. 336)

There are ice mountains on Earth, of course, although it is implied that they are a bigger feature of Gorzun - but they cannot cover the entire surface because there has to be an ecology to support the large, four-armed Gorzuni.

We notice three senses in the quoted paragraph:

seen blue and green;
smell of salt;
sound of wind.

(The Terrestrial tricolor (scroll down) should be blue, white and green.)

The ship goes into secondary drive and leaves the Solar System. Thus, it is retroactively decreed that this "secondary drive" is identical with the multiple quantum jumps "hyperdrive" of the Technic History.

Meeting Manuel Argos

Manse Everard only works here. See The Quotable Time Patrol and "I only work here."

Dominic Flandry only works here. See "I only work here" II.

Kathryn McCormac says that we only live here. See "We only live here..."

John Reeves, captured by the alien barbarian Gorzuni and herded with other prisoners aboard one of their space tenders, notices that the drunk Gorzuni medic who inspects the prisoners and beheads any that are too sickly is assisted by a man whom Reeves addresses as, "'You filthy bastard...'" ("The Star Plunderer," p. 334)

The man, indicating his iron collar, replies, "'I only work here, Lieutenant...'" (ibid.)

The prisoners have already been forced to strip but the medic's assistant had noticed Reeves' uniform and now takes no offense at Reeves' remark. Indeed, he is noting who will help him to overthrow the Gorzuni. This is Manuel Argos. 

Consistency

The management of the Solar Commonwealth space fleet:

"...bespoke idiocy  - well, be charitable and say ignorance  - at the highest levels of government."
-Poul Anderson, Mirkheim IN Anderson, Rise Of The Terran Empire (Riverdale, NY, 2011), pp. 1-291 AT VIII, p. 134.

Its orders are:

"'...issued by politicians safe at home, who've always held the theory and practice of war is too wicked a subject for civilized men to study.'" (VIII, p. 125)

204 pages and several centuries later but in a story published twenty five years earlier:

"It was a stupid policy, typical of the blundering leadership that had helped lose us our wars."
-"The Star Plunderer," p. 329.

Future historians work hard to keep their series consistent.

Anderson And Asimov Again

Isaac Asimov's future history and Poul Anderson's Technic Civilization future history share two premises: hyperdrive and an interstellar empire (with an Emperor). They also have a structural similarity: the linking together of two originally independent futuristic series set in earlier and later periods.

I can suggest four ways to make Asimov's future history less implausible and/or more interesting. All four would make his history more like Anderson's.

(i) A much smaller empire.

(ii) An original rationale for the "hyperspace" cliche, like Anderson's multiple quantum jumps.

(iii) A multi-species galaxy. (This is more interesting but not more plausible.)

(iv) Not a predictive science of society but an evidence-based theory of historical cycles.

Although Anderson linked van Rijn and Flandry, he did not subordinate all subsequent volumes to the need to rationalize the linkage.

If you like Asimov, then read Anderson. If you have not read Anderson before, then you will be surprised.