Refugee
Page 33
This is the first of five novels published in the 1980’s, tracing the life of the Space Tyrant in a setting that translates the global politics of Earth of the 1980’s to the Solar system. It was deliberately designed as old fashioned space opera: strong action interspersed with spot lectures on science, except that there are no cardboard characters here, and the sexual aspect of mankind is not avoided. The science stems from a single assumption: that a way is discovered to shield objects from gravity. The details on the planets and moons of the Solar system and conditions in space are as authentic as my research could make them. I really believe that it could be like this, if gravity shielding is ever discovered. I believe the politics and crime are already like this too; human corruption seems to be universal. Ah, but you think there could not be such brutality toward the helpless in your own nice neighborhood? Unfortunately there can be and is. There are ways in which our species is not at all nice. You wonder how the spaceways (waterways) can be so filled with pirates? Mostly they are filled with opportunistic fishermen and shippers who have little scruple about taking what they can get. They are normal folk, sad to say. When there is a power outage or a bad storm in any city, the looters appear immediately. Opportunity brings them out. However, the following novels are not entirely downbeat like this one; they move on into the allegorical heights as a chastened refugee from Haiti (Half-cal) forges upward in American (Jupiter) society, and down the other side, without flinching. This is not a series for the squeamish.
This novel, and this series, is fiction, intended to entertain the reader. But I believe that the best fiction has a didactic component; that is, that it teaches the reader something, or makes him think. In this case, what about the problem of refugees, or immigration? When people are oppressed at home, shouldn’t they have a chance to make a better life elsewhere? Isn’t it cruel to deny them that chance? But this is not the whole issue. There is what is termed the lifeboat analogy: there is one lifeboat, but too many people for it. If it is overloaded, it will capsize, and everyone will drown. So it may be cruel to repel additional boarders once it is full, but it is necessary lest everyone perish. Consider a nation as a lifeboat: it has enough for its people because it has developed its resources wisely and kept its population in check. Is it then to be swamped by refugees from the nation that has acted irresponsibly? Real-life cases aren’t this clean, of course, but that’s the essence. The answer is generally that one nation does not, and perhaps should not, accept the refuse of another. So it rejects refugees, or ships them back to where they came from. That looks terrible, when they get punished or killed there. But is there a better answer? So though I hurt for rejected immigrants, I can’t say that the policy of rejecting them is wrong. The source of the problem is back in global and national and family ways that folk don’t see fit to revise; only when the devastating fruits of these ways appear is there concern, and then it is too late for any “nice” solution. This is the thought for this novel.
This Author’s Note was written in June, 1999, 17 years after the novel.
REFUGEE
Volume 1: Bio of a Space Tyrant
Copyright © 1983 by Piers Anthony
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