The Many Worlds of Poul Anderson

by Roger Elwood

  Manipulation denies men the opportunity to decide their own response to challenges. The best intentions and loftiest objectives cannot avert disaster as the history of Anderson’s Psychotechnic Institute illustrates. Established in the aftermath of World War III to improve individuals and society, the Institute develops techniques to shape history to its own specifications. It no longer suffices to ‘meet the future when it gets here” argues an Institute supporter: ‘“That is what man has always done. And that is why the race has always blundered from one catastrophe to the next. This may be our last chance to change the pattern’ ” (“Marius”).

  But two generations later when the world has recovered, the Institute still considers itself the only savior of mankind. This period is described in “The Sensitive Man” (a story with a protagonist as smugly self-righteous as the supermen in Heinlein’s “Gulf”).

  ‘I take it you favor libertarian government.’ he said. ‘In the past it’s always broken down sooner or later and the main reason has been that there aren’t enough people with the intelligence, alertness, and toughness to resist the inevitable encroachments of power on liberty.’

  A critic replies:

  ‘But what sort of person is needed? Who decides it? You’ve decided you are the almighty arbiters. Your superior wisdom is going to lead poor mankind up the road to heaven. I say it’s down the road to hell!’

  Read in isolation, ‘The Sensitive Man” seems inconsistent with the rest of Anderson’s work. But in the context of its series, it is ironic: the objections blithely dismissed in ‘The Sensitive Man” eventually prove correct. In “Question and Answer” set a century later, the Institute is so intoxicated with its plan for man’s future it plots to forestall stellar exploration —man is still too “uncivilized” to “deserve” the stars. An Institute agent says: ‘It will take a thousand years of slow, subtle, secret direction … to evolve the culture we want… . Men won’t be blind, greedy, pushing, ruthless animals; there will be restraint, and dignity, and contentment … .’

  A spaceman replies:

  ‘I claim that man crawling into his own little shell to think pure thoughts and contemplate his navel is no longer man… . I like man as he is and not man as a bunch of theorists thinks he ought to be… . Personally, I believe that no small group has the right to impose its own will on everybody else… . I vote for telling the truth, going out to the stars, and taking the consequences. Good, bad, or indifferent. I want to see what the consequences are, and I think most men do.’

  The mighty Institute is discredited and outlawed: hubris, nemesis, até. ‘The tragic flaw in the character of Institute personnel was only that they were human” (“The Snows of Ganymede”).

  These same issues are vividly summarized in “No Truce With Kings.” Here a small group of aliens secretly attempts to redesign post-Armageddon society. They try to force a centralized state and a passive, collectivized society upon men “for their own good.” But the patronizing aliens actually fear human vitality. Their race wants no competition from other civilizations. Their role is discovered during a war they instigated to further their plan. One of the soldiers who exposed the conspiracy reacts:

  ‘If you’d come openly, like honest folk, you’d had found some to listen to you. Maybe enough, even. But no, your do-gooding had to be subtle and crafty. You knew what was right for us. We weren’t entitled to any say in the matter.’ …

  … ‘Sure we make some ghasdy blunders, we humans. But they’re our own. And we learn from them. You’re the ones who won’t learn.’

  Subversion in “No Truce With Kings” depends on superior material technology and social manipulation. In The Star Ways and “The Queen of Air and Darkness” enemy strategy relies chiefly on illusion, suggestion, and psychic phenomena. Not only do the aliens delude men, they make them enjoy being deluded. Unmasking these conspiracies leaves despair in the deceivers and outrage in the deceived. But if the aliens can overcome their aversion for human ways, willing partnership can replace secret aggression to the benefit of both sides.

  Even public, benevolent interference can be deadly. The hero of ‘The Longest Voyage” (1960) rejects premature interstellar contact lest his own world be deprived of an exciting stage in its development and thereby forfeit its own uniqueness. “The Helping Hand” contrasts the reactions of two war-ravaged alien societies to preferred Terran aid. Lush Cundaloa is corrupted by accepting and loses its creativity. Grim Skontar rebuilds itself single-handedly without sacrificing its dignity.

  The most poignant example of this theme is Let the Spacemen Beware! (1963). Explorers who rediscover the lost Terran colony Gwydion admire the uncanny serenity of its inhabitants. But the idyllic life of the Gwydiona is punctuated with periods of biochemically induced schizophrenia. The expedition s military head, who is deeply grounded in archaic traditions, can understand their myth-saturated culture. The technocratic civilian chief, his rival in love, is completely baffled. Despite the formers warnings, the latter attempts to interfere during the madness and thereby triggers needless slaughter. The soldier gives his life so that his comrades and his Gwydiona beloved can escape. She will never even remember how he died.

  However, the powerful statements all these stories make on the dangers of intervention must be reconciled with the authors approval of interfering agencies like the Galactic Patrol and the Time Patrol. The unsubtle Galactic Patrol series (“The Double-Dyed Villains” 1949, “Enough Rope” 1953, and “The Live Coward” 1956) relates this organization’s efforts to keep peace in the galaxy through deceit, bribery, blackmail, or any other unscrupulous method so long as they do not cause the death of a single rational being. The Patrol’s ethics are simply based on choosing the lesser evils. As one member explains:

  ‘And I, for one, would rather break any number of arbitrary laws and moral rules, and wreck a handful of lives of idiots who think with a blaster, than see a planet go up in flames or … see one baby killed in a war it never even heard about.’

  (“The Double-Dyed Villains”)

  The men of the Time Patrol (The Guardians of Time 1960 and “My Object All Sublime” 1961) face more complex issues. They are charged with guarding the timeline that leads to the indescribably evolved men of the far distant future who discover time travel. They eliminate anachronisms that weaken the temporal fabric, apprehend fugitives from future justice, and correct changes made by time-criminals. Intervening to preserve history as it has been seems permissible even though it means leaving suffering unrelieved.

  He had seen enough human misery in all the ages. You got case hardened after a while, but down underneath, when a peasant stared at you with sick brutalized eyes, or a soldier screamed with a pike through him, or a city went up in radioactive flame, something wept. He could understand the fanatics who tried to change events. It was only that their work was so unlikely to make anything better.

  (“Delenda Est” 1955)

  But the temporal agents can also be ordered to change “real” history to suit their superiors’ needs. Historical reality is, in the end, merely relative. The dilemma of contradictory interests stated in ‘The Only Game in Town” (1960) is not solved there nor is it solved in unrelated stories like “Progress” and ‘Turning Point.” Collisions between equally sincere men are inevitable as in Let the Spacemen Beware!, The Rebel Worlds, and “The People of the Wind.” Anderson does not see any clear answers. He sees the pain choice must bring. Here lies the distinction between licit and illicit intervention: those who would change the course of the universe must bear the guilt.

  What guards the guardians is their humility and the anguish they endure for their deeds.

  Finally, when men meet any challenge, they must accept responsibility. Power without responsibility is tyranny. Therefore Anderson’s rulers suffer. Leadership is kingship—de jure or de facto. Its splendor is sorrowful. The heroes of Tau Zero and There Will Be Time accept their royal roles only during crises. They are anxious to be freed of their crowns on
ce the need has passed.

  Not unexpectedly, the ancient myth of the king’s saving death inspires some stories. A secret agent characterizes his work: “ We are the kings who die for the people so that little boys with shoeshine kits may not be fried on molten streets’ ” (“State of Assassination” 1959). In “Kings Who Die” (1962) spacemen’s deaths in an endless, stalemated war between America and Unasia serve as ritual sacrifice to preserve the rest of mankind. The hero explains:

  Today the machine age has developed its own sacrificial kings. We are the chosen of the race. The best it can offer, none gainsays us. We may have what we choose, pleasure, luxury, women, adulation—only not the simple pleasures of wife and child and home, for we must die that the people may live.’

  When an American and a Russian attempt to replace the slaughter with peaceful exploration, their collaboration fails. Bloodshed continues unabated.

  Anderson’s elites—spacemen or witches, secret agents or feudal lords—exist ideally to serve. Two good examples occur in the UN-Man series and Brain Wave.

  The UN-Men are a band of identical exogenetic brothers, created and trained as special UN operatives by the Psychotechnic Institute. They are amply endowed with all the author’s favorite skills: mental, physical, linguistic, and artistic. They are also considerate, humble, perceptive, dependable, and good-humored. They are more remarkable for the full and balanced development of all their abilities than for any specific outstanding talent. Although performing invaluable services for the world, they do not share the Institute’s delusions of superiority or its tragic fall. Some of the Brothers eventually join another elite service group, the semi-monastic Order of Engineers.

  In Brain Wave, an exponential increase in human intelligence suddenly makes men mentally superior to every other race they find in the galaxy. But these transcendent geniuses have no wish to conquer or domesticate other beings. They envision their future role:

  ‘We will not be gods, or even guides. But we will—some of us—be givers of opportunity. We will see that evil does not flourish too strongly, and that hope and chance happen when they are most needed, to all those millions of sentient creatures who live and love and fight and laugh and weep and die, just as man once did. No, we will not be embodied Fate; but perhaps w;e can be Luck. And even, it may be, Love.’

  This benevolence stands in violent contrast to the contemptuous attitudes of “Genius” (1948), Anderson’s third published story. A colony of “pure geniuses” not only reviles the rest of humanity, but plots to rule it:

  The genius is forced into the straightjacket of the mediocre man’s and the moron’s mentality. That he can expand any distance at all beyond his prison is a tribute to the supreme power of high intellect… .

  … The ordinary man is just plain stupid…. He follows, or rather accepts what the creative or dominant minority does, but it is haltingly and unwillingly.

  This wretched story is an anomaly and a present embarrassment to its author. He has kept to the path of compassion ever since.

  Anderson’s hero can be defined as “the man who pays the price.” His endowments, motives, or even virtues are irrelevant. Readiness to bear burdens for some good purpose is all that matters. A man’s willingness to suffer—not what he suffers—is the measure of heroism. Other writers see things differently. Heinlein heroes, untroubled by guilt or regret, are supremely confident of themselves and their causes. They have no sense of ambivalence. Delanys tolerant heroes suffer but never have to grapple with vices within themselves or make agonizing ethical decisions.

  The Anderson hero has pragmatic ethics. The end justifies the means if one can stand the cost. As James Blish observes, “For Anderson, the tragic hero is a man … who is driven partly by circumstances, but mostly by his own conscience, to do the wrong thing for the right reason—and then has to live with the consequences.”5 Two particularly cruel examples of this occur in “The Burning Bridge” (1960) and “Sister Planet.”

  Spacefleet commander Joshua Coffin, a bleak Puritan with an aching sense of duty, saves Earth s first (and perhaps last) interstellar colonization effort from failure with a lie that could cost a man s life. Overcome by guilt, he retires from spacefaring, which is the only thing he loves. A long grim decade will pass before he learns to live with himself again.

  “Sister Planet” presents a complicated set of moral dilemmas. Human explorers on Venus discover a way to terraform that planet. They decide to suppress their discovery since it would doom the indigenous race. After ravaging their own world men have no right to colonize at the expense of another intelligent species. But no knowledge can be permanently suppressed and human society is growing so brutal it would not shrink from planetary genocide. Realizing this, the hero teaches the innocent natives to fear men by bombing their holy place and forestalls future expeditions by murdering all his companions and blaming the natives for this crime. Although Venus is spared, he is seared by excruciating pangs of guilt: “Oh God … please exist. Please make a hell for me.” Remorse over killing his friends drives him to suicide.

  Elegant Dominic Flandry is also a price-paying hero. He is committing spiritual suicide—trading off bits of his soul for success in vital intelligence missions. From his earliest adventure, Ensign Flandry (1966), in which he deliberately beguiles and betrays a courtesan who loves him, the weight of his guilt grows. Yet his costly efforts are not entirely in vain, for worlds he helps save survive the fall of the Terran Empire.

  Purely private heroism also exacts its price. It may require rejecting marriage for the good of the beloved (Shield and “Starfog”), or remaining in an unsatisfactory marriage (“Brave to be a King” 1959 and Three Worlds to Conquer 1964), or reconciling conflicting loves (“No Truce With Kings,” The Rebel Worlds and The Dancer From Atlantis). “Escape From Orbit” (1962) depicts this best. A NASA ground controller who had resigned from astronaut training to care for his sick wife suffers gnawing regret, constant pressure, and involuntary celibacy. His professional problems can be solved, his personal ones only endured. But his sense of family responsibility allows no self-pity.

  One obvious obstacle to heroism is the refusal to suffer. “The Disinherited” reverses the situation in “Sister Planet.” Terran scientists studying an idyllic planet enjoy living there so much, they refuse to return to overcrowded Earth although the future good of the autochthones and their own descendants demands it. An envoy from Earth pleads for responsible action:

  I have so much pride [in being a man] that I will not see my race guilty of the ultimate crime. We are not going to make anyone else pay for our mistakes. We are going home and see if we cannot amend them ourselves.’

  But the scientists defy him and must be evacuated by force.

  A subtler pitfall is false asceticism—the overvaluing of suffering. In “The Mills of the Gods,” dour Joshua Coffin slowly comes to realize the limits of austerity as a path to virtue. In Rogue Sword (1960), the ruthless Aragonese knight En Jaime refuses to accept this: “ ‘But do you really believe that nothing more is required of man than … than kindness?’ ”

  The stupendous effects of intelligently directed kindness are demonstrated in “The Sharing of Flesh.” The heroine forces herself to be merciful despite the pressures of cultural conditioning and personal inclination. She forgives her husband’s murderer and reveals how the people of his planet can be freed from a genetic compulsion to cannibalism. Had she withheld the information out of revenge, her sin would have been infinitely worse than anything the natives had done. The gentler, more “liberal” explorers pity the natives, but their tender feelings are mingled with revulsion and do nothing to help correct the situation.

  Anderson’s hero is no Übermensch:

  In so far as human qualities are important in war or less violent conflict, they tend to be courage and steadiness of purpose rather than intellectual complexity.

  (Is There Life on Other Worlds?’)

  Instead, his heroes are often typical members o
f a group or class distinguished principally by willingness to seize the initiative. A minor bureaucrat starts a successful revolution in “Sam Hall.” The heroines of ‘Time Lag,” We Claim These Stars!, and “The Sharing of Flesh” are representative women of their planets. A timid, effete-looking alien thwarts human space pirates in “A Little Knowledge” (1972). A witch, a bobtailed werewolf, and a tomcat harrow Hell in Operation Chaos (1972). (The werewolf-hero cites this as an example of God’s sense of humor.) Three Hearts and Three Lions depicts a humble man who is in actuality an epic hero. In our world he is quiet Holger Carlson:

  We were all his friends. He was an amiable, slow-spoken fellow, thoroughly down to earth, with simple tastes in living style and humor. … As an engineer he was satisfactory if unspectacular, his talents running more toward rule-of-thumb practicality than the analytical approach. … All in all, Holger was a nice average guy, what was later called a good Joe.

  But in the alternate universe of Faerie he is the fabulous Carolingian paladin Holger Danske. After ordeals in Faerie he recognizes his true identity and takes up his role as Defender of mankind to break the hosts of Chaos.