by Roger Elwood
Of course the author has not always been absolutely consistent in his opinions. No human being could be. Nevertheless he has persistently upheld the importance of “challenge and response” during more than a quarter century as a professional writer. Publication dates will be cited at the first mention of each work to demonstrate this continuity.1
Anderson’s first proposition, men need challenge if they are to remain human, is concisely stated in “We Have Fed Our Sea”/The Enemy Stars (1958): “No people live long, who offer their young men naught but fatness and security.”
The external, physical world is an indispensable source of challenge:
A civilization which just sat down and stared at its own inwardness—how soon would it become stagnant, caste-ridden, poor, and nasty? You can’t think unless you have something to think about. And this has to come from outside. Doesn’t it? The universe is immeasurably larger than any mind. (There Will Be Time 1973)
So essential is challenge both for the species and the individual that an artificial one can serve as effectively as a real one. For example: a nonexistent criminal wrecks a dictatorship in “Sam Hall” (1953); contrived political pressure changes society in “Robin Hood’s Barn” (1959); and alien conquerors try to provoke a healthy counterreaction from their human subjects in “Inside Earth” (1951). As the hero of the last-mentioned story explains:
‘Valgolia [Terra’s overlord] is the great and lonely enemy, the self-appointed Devil, since none of us can be angels. It is the source of challenge and adversity such as has always driven intelligence onward and upward, in spite of itself/
In essays, speeches, and fiction the author repeatedly stresses space exploration as the future’s greatest real challenge. This would provide a safety valve and a psychological stimulus for the entire species just as other frontiers have throughout history. Besides the intellectual, practical, and even aesthetic potential of space, Anderson feels that “our enterprise beyond the sky will keep alive that sense of bravery … and achievement without which man would hardly be himself” (Is There Life on Other Worlds? 1963). Or as expressed in “Marque and Reprisal” (1965):
That’s why we’ve got to move into space… . Room. A chance to get out of this horrible huddle on Earth, walk free, be our own men, try out new ways to live, work, think, create, wonder.
Dispersal into space would also insure survival of humankind if Earth were destroyed. ‘The Children of Fortune” (1961), “The Day After Doomsday”/After Doomsday (1961), “Epilogue” (1962), and Tau Zero (1970) are based on this premise. Anderson places an exceedingly high value on racial propagation because it guarantees a kind of immortality—the only demonstrably certain kind. The narrator of “The Man Who Came Early” (1956) states this from the pagan Norse viewpoint: ” The house and the blood … are holy. Men die and women weep, but while the kindred live our names are remembered/ ”
The author’s concern with perpetuation ignites into glory in Tau Zero. In this novel an Einsteinian starship malfunctions and cannot decelerate to complete its colonization mission. As it accelerates closer and closer to the speed of light eons speed by in heartbeats. The expedition outlives this cycle of creation and beholds the reforging of the stars. The now-repaired vessel is brought to rest on a planet in the new universe. Could not future ships repeat this feat, forever and ever, human world without end? The race can make itself—if not its members— immortal.
Yet “there can be too great a price for survival” (‘Turning Point” 1963). It is by no means the ultimate value.
But there were limits… . Some things were more important than survival. Than even the survival of a cause.
It came to Sverdlov that this was another way a man might serve his planet: just by being the right kind of man, maybe a better way than planning the extinction of people who happened to live somewhere else.
(“We Have Fed Our Sea”)
Or as the hero of “The Mills of the Gods” (1961) reminds us: “‘Honor wasn’t enough. Survival wasn’t enough. You had to be kind as well.’ ”
Mere purposeless prolongation of life, whether of the race or the individual, is a futile goal, as the moody elves in The Broken Sword (1954) and the immortal men in ‘The Star Beast” (1950) realize to their sorrow. One of the latter muses: “ ‘Death is the longest voyage of all. Without death there is no evolution, no real meaning to life, the ultimate adventure has been snatched away/” Men need to be liberated from the paralyzing fear of death and enslavement to a promise of synthetic resurrection in “Goat Song” (1972). On the other hand, immortality does not corrupt men in “The Ancient Gods”/World Without Stars (1966) because they are still willing to risk their lives and can die bravely when they must.
The quality rather than the quantity of life is what matters. The composite picture of good living which emerges from Anderson’s stories has undeniable appeal. It features robust enjoyment of such things as sailing, scotch, and Mozart (which is to say: nature, conviviality, and the arts). Anderson is interested in how well, how creatively, how intensely, people live. Men require the stimulation of constant challenge to attain excellence. A perfect world from which challenge had been excluded would be soul destroying. The antitechnological Out-world in “The Queen of Air and Darkness” (1971) is a cruel delusion as are the fantasy realms of Faerie in The Broken Sword and Three Hearts and Three Lions (1961).
But technology is more usually the villain. In “Quixote and the Windmill” (1950), complete automation has robbed ordinary people of the opportunity to create and feel useful, resulting in mass ennui. The same craving for meaningful work is reiterated in “What Shall It Profit?” (1956). Material satiety produces mindless hedonism, apathy, and ultimately decadence in “The Star Beast” and “Conversation in Arcady” (1963). A totally planned society causes evolutionary reversal in “The High Ones” (1958), since the absence of challenge obviates the necessity for intelligence.
Technological anti-utopias abound in Anderson’s writing (e.g., the UN-Man series, 1953ff.;2 “Ghetto” 1954; “The Long Way Home”/No World of Their Own 1955; “Inside Straight” 1955; “We Have Fed Our Sea”; ‘Time Lag” 1961; Orbit Unlimited 1961; the Gearchy series, 1965ff.;3 “Fortune Hunter” 1973). The author was an active environmentalist long before ecology became fashionable. He denounces the world-ravaging, dehumanizing effects of existing technic civilization. Men, he says in “License” (1957), do not want to be “crowded together, and chained to one tiny spot of the earth’s surface, and be an anonymous unit, bossed and herded and jammed into an iron desert of a city, subordinating food and sleep and digestion and love and play to a single monotonous job.” The issue is also debated in “Progress” (1962).
‘If industrialism can feed and clothe people better, though, doesn’t it deserve to win out?’
‘Who says it can? It can feed and clothe more people, yes. But not necessarily better. And are sheer numbers any measure of quality?’
But since there can be no turning back now, he proposes alternatives. The crudest one is some marvelous invention which will permit individual economic independence and therefore personal freedom. Examples are the protective force field in Shield (1962) and a cheap universal power source in “Snowball” (1955).
It is far more difficult to rechannel human nature by internal conversion. This is unsuccessfully attempted by alien intruders in “No Truce With Kings” (1963) and by the Psychotechnic Institute in the UN-Man series. This approach can more easily harm than heal. The aliens’ secret efforts to modify humanity incite war and discredit their unwitting human agents, and while the Institute initially uses its techniques of individual mental-physical conditioning and group sociodynamics to fight tyranny, it eventually mistakes means for ends and perishes through pride. Saving men against their will is no true salvation.
Some pressures of contemporary civilization could be eased by extraterrestrial colonization as in The Star Fox (1966), Tales of the Flying Mountains (1970), and Is There Life on Other Worlds?.
But the best solution would be a radical, voluntary restructuring, for “civilization was not material technology but a thought-pattern and an understanding” (The Star Ways (1956). New possibilities are suggested: in The Byworlder (1971) and its essay version, “More Futures Than One,” and in “The People of the Wind” (1973) and its foreshadow, “Outpost of Empire” (1967). The former pair describe a near-future mosaic society in which technology has become the handmaiden of ecology. The latter two stories are set on colonial planets where human and alien cultures have successfully melded.
If experimentation fails, improvements may still result from a cleansing catastrophe. A drastic, abrupt increase in human and animal intelligence shatters society in Brain Wave (1954), but it also transfigures man and sends him spacefaring. After global holocausts men rediscover benevolent feudalism and local autonomy (“No Truce With Kings”), exploit mutant physical and mental powers plus a new style of logic (Twilight World 1961), wed science to magic (“Superstition” 1956), and develop an ecologically sensitive neo-Polynesian civilization (“The Sky People” 1959 and “Progress”) which first restores the earth and then yields to a new interstellar cosmopolitanism (There Will Be Time 1972). A voluntary mutual aid organization is a more benign replacement for the fallen Terran Empire in “Starfog” (1967). When Bronze Age Crete and the contemporary West go down in blood and fire, even higher civilizations replace them according to The Dancer From Atlantis (1972). The utterly indomitable heroine of this last novel declares:
‘We have our victory—for it was a victory, that we and those in our care outlived the end of a world and even saved much of it for the world which is to follow. … I see now that we were never slaves to fate, because our own wills were what made that destiny for us.’
All these stories imply that the emergence of a healthier successor society at least partly compensates for the disaster that brought it forth.
Obviously, adaptation without such painful stimulus is preferable. Since Anderson has described his utopia so often— at least two dozen times in twenty years—a general description is easy. Except for unspoiled aliens who have avoided technological deformation altogether (“Green Thumb” 1953, “Sister Planet” 1959, and The Star Ways’), his Utopians are human colonists on a marvelously beautiful world. (Of course he has also shown vigorous societies on harsh worlds such as Vixen, Kraken, Lochlanna, and Kirkasant in the Terran Empire series,4 but the ideal case is at issue here.) Utopia’s population is extremely low—typically ten million—and stable. Government is minimal and decentralized. Individual citizens possess exceptional initiative, resourcefulness, and stability. They are adept at fine arts, crafts, and athletics. They have a great reverence for tradition and a deep emotional attachment for their planet. A sophisticated understanding of ecology enables the colonists to enjoy nature without ruining it. Their vigorous culture is that of their ancient Terran ancestors modified by a fresh environment. The entire system might be termed “scientific pastoralism.”
‘Time Lag” is an excellent example of utopia and anti-utopia locked in mortal combat. The “Finnish” Vaynamoans defeat the invading “Russian” Chertokians despite a 1:500 population disparity because the former surpass the latter in scientific achievement, cultural vitality, and most of all, courage. Vaynamo is lush and unspoiled. Mans presence enhances rather than diminishes the beauty of the landscape:
Ahead stretched grainfields and pastures, still wet from winter but their shy green deepening toward summer hues, on down to the great metallic sheet of Lake Rovaniemi and then across the opposite horizon, where the High Mikkela reared into a sky as tall and blue as itself.
Chertoki is a planet-sized slum:
The city grew bigger, smokier, uglier… . The desert could no longer be seen, even from the highest towers, only the abandoned mine and slag mountains, in the process of conversion into tenements.
The Vaynamoans are both energetic and tradition minded. The heroine describes herself:
I’m the Magnates daughter and the Freeholders wife, I have a University degree and a pistol-shooting medal, as a girl I sailed through hurricanes and skindove into grottoes where fanfish laired, as a woman I brought a son into the world… .’ … Tm a true daughter of Vaynamo, … whatever is traditional, full of memories, whatever has been looked at and been done by all the generations before me, I hold dear. The Chertokians don’t care. They haven’t any past worth remembering.’
Right prevails in ‘Time Lag” and the brave remain free. Vaynamo has to repel one expansionist neighbor, but Avalon in ‘The People of the Wind” resists annexation by the mighty Terran Empire. In this latter story the will to resist and the wit to prepare defenses again bring victory.
Not all of Anderson’s utopias fare as fortunately. They can be destroyed by Nature (“The Pirate” 1968), willingly abandoned (‘Turning Point” 1963 and “Gypsy” 1950), forcibly evacuated (“The Chapter Ends” 1954 and “The Disinherited” 1966), perverted (“The Helping Hand” 1950), or disrupted by new social developments (forthcoming sequels to Orbit Unlimited). Even if undisturbed, human imperfection must inevitably spoil these fair domains, thus initiating new cycles of collapse and recovery and generating perennial historical challenges. Awareness of evil does not drive Anderson to despair. He remains unquenchably optimistic over man’s capacity to meet whatever demands the universe presents.
Anderson’s second principle requires that challenges be promptly faced, however they may arise. This theme of immediate response has appeared so often it is difficult to select the most representative examples. ‘The High Crusade” (1960), “No Truce With Kings,” The Star Fox, and the UN-Man series all stress the importance of solving current problems rather than bequeathing them to future generations. The hero of “Brake” declares: “ Well, it’ll only be us who die now. Not a hundred million people twenty or thirty years from now.’ ” Indifference to the well-being of its descendants is a sign of the Terran Empire’s decadence.
To hell with it. Let civilization hang together long enough for Dominic Flandry to taste a few more vintages, ride a few more horses, kiss a lot more girls and sing another ballad or two, that would suffice. At least it was all he dared hope for.
(“Hunters of the Sky Cave”/We Claim These Stars! 1959)
When Flandry tries on fashionable cynicism for size, he finds it a less than perfect fit. But he is unwilling to acknowledge his hidden altruism even to himself.
Challenge must not only be met briskly, it must be met freely. Anderson’s concept of freedom is positive—it is the presence of opportunity, not the absence of restraint. Violating the freedom of rational beings by domesticating or manipulating them is a heinous crime. What the author calls “domestication” is exploitation by shielding from challenge. The free will, individuality, and self-awareness of one group is damped by another until these essential properties atrophy: “A slave may or may not obey. But a domestic animal has got to obey. His genes won’t let him do any different” (“The Master Key” 1964). The threat of domestication plainly alarms the author. He fears the emasculating consequences of some contemporary trends: loss of option, initiative, and meaningful work; collectivization and homogenization; decline of rationality, taste, and competence. First introduced in Brain Wave, Anderson reiterated this problem in The Star Ways, “The Children of Fortune,” “Turning Point,” “No Truce With Kings,” The Star Fox, “Satan’s World” (1968), “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” and “Goat Song.” It also generated the plots of “The Master Key” and ‘The Ancient Gods.”
In “The Master Key” traders from the Polesotechnic League encounter a race of radically unsocial aliens which controls another intelligent species to be its servants. Unable to comprehend human civilization, the dominant Yildivians cannot decide if men are free “wild” beings like themselves or runaway “domesticated” beings like their Lugals. Actually, men can be either.
‘We here in this room are wild/ Van Rijn said. We do what we do because we want to or because
it is right… . But how many slaves have there been in earth’s long history, that their masters could trust? … And how many people today is domestic animals at heart? Wanting somebody else should tell them what to do, take care of their needfuls, and protect them not just against their fellow men but against themselves? And why has every free human society been so short-lived? Is this not because the wild-animal men are born so heartbreakingly seldom?’
Anderson presents the curse of domestication even more sharply in “The Ancient Gods.” The Ai Chun are an incredibly old race with psychic powers who believe themselves to be gods and demand worship from other beings. By eons of selective breeding they raise another species to sentience and enslave them. A few of these escape and develop their own social structure and monotheistic religion. A crew of marooned spacemen aids the free Pack against the Ai Chun, but a psychological flaw causes one man to defect to the enemy. Having surrendered his will and identity to the aliens, he stubbornly prefers bondage to manly struggle and dies with his masters. In contrast, Valland, the de facto leader of the humans is a splendidly free man. He is considerate, loyal, tenacious, and talented. With serene independence he rejects the permissive sexual mores of his society for a lifetime of heroic chastity. To Anderson freedom is a painful glory; it is no cloak for selfishness.
