Imperial Stars 2-Republic and Empire

by Jerry Pournelle

  Sung-wu described them, his olive face turning to a sickly green. When he had finished, the three men looked significantly at each other.

  Ben Tinker got to his feet. "Come along," he commanded briskly, taking the Bard by the arm. "I have something to show you. It is left from the old days. Sooner or later we'll advance enough to turn out our own, but right now we have only these remaining few. We have to keep them guarded and sealed."

  "This is for a good cause," one of the sons said. "It's worth it." He caught his brother's eye and grinned.

  Bard Chai finished reading Sung-wu's blue-slip report; he tossed it suspiciously down and eyed the younger Bard. "You're sure? There's no further need of investigation?"

  "The cult will wither away," Sung-wu murmured indifferently. "It lacks any real support; it's merely an escape valve, without intrinsic validity."

  Chai wasn't convinced. He reread parts of the report again. "I suppose you're right; but we've heard so many—"

  "Lies," Sung-wu said vaguely. "Rumours. Gossip. May I go?" He moved toward the door.

  "Eager for your vacation?" Chai smiled understandingly. "I know how you feel. This report must have exhausted you. Rural areas, stagnant backwaters. We must prepare a better programme of rural education. I'm convinced whole regions are in a jangled state. We've got to bring clearness to these people. It's our historic role; our class function."

  "Verily," Sung-wu murmured, as he bowed his way out of the office and down the hall.

  As he walked he fingered his beads thankfully. He breathed a silent prayer as his fingers moved over the surface of the little red pellets, shiny spheres that glowed freshly in place of the faded old—the gift of the Tinkerists. The beads would come in handy; he kept his hand on them tightly. Nothing must happen to them, in the next eight months. He had to watch them carefully, while he poked around the ruined cities of Spain—and finally came down with the plague.

  He was the first Bard to wear a rosary of penicillin capsules.

  Editor's Introduction To:

  Reactionary Utopias

  Gregory Benford

  It is sometimes said that Professor Gregory Benford is the only person alive who may win both a Hugo and a Nobel Prize.

  He already has his Hugo, and as a professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, he has at least a shot at the Nobel.

  If he ever wanted to give up both science fiction and physics, he could make a good living at literary criticism. Most critical essays have little to say. This one says a lot.

  Fair warning: Ursula K. LeGuin's The Dispossessed won a Hugo; second place was The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle.

  Reactionary Utopias

  Gregory Benford

  One of the striking facets of fictional Utopias is that nobody really wants to live there. Perhaps the author, or a few friends, will profess some eagerness. But seldom do Utopian fictions awaken a real longing to take part.

  I suspect this is because most visions of supposedly better societies have features which violate our innate sense of human progress—they don't look like the future. They may even resemble a warped, malignant form of the past.

  Time and again, utopists envision worlds where one aspect of human character is enhanced, and much else is suppressed. Plato's Republic was the first and most easily understandable of these; he thought the artists and similar unreliable sorts should be expelled. Too disruptive, y'know.

  Should we be uncomfortable with this fact? If we value western European ideals, yes.

  Utopian fictions stress ideas, so we need a way to advance the background assumption while suppressing the foreground of plot and character.

  Nearly all Utopias have one or more characteristics which I'll call reactionary, in the sense that they recall the past, often in its worst aspects. Here "reactionary" means an aesthetic analogy, no more. It may apply to works which are to the "left" in the usual political spectrum. (I think this one-dimensional spectrum is so misleading that the customary use of "reactionary" means little.) "Regressive" might be an alternate term, meaning that a Utopia seeks to turn back the tide of western thought.

  Looking over the vast range of Utopian literature, I sense five dominant reactionary characteristics:

  1. Lack of diversity. Culture is everywhere the same, with few ethnic or other divergences.

  2. Static in time. Like diversity, change in time would imply that either the past or the present of the Utopia was less than perfect, i.e., not Utopian.

  3. Nostalgic and technophobic. Usually this takes the form of isolation in a rural environment, organization harkening back to the village or even the farm, and only the simplest technology. Many writers here reveal their fondness for medieval society. The few pieces of technology superior to today's usually exist only to speed the plot or provide metaphorical substance; they seldom spring from the society itself. (Only those Utopias which include some notion of scientific advancement qualify as SF. Otherwise they are usually simple rural fantasies. This point also calls into question classifying any Utopia as SF if it is drastically technophobic. Simply setting it in the future isn't enough.)

  4. Presence of an authority figure. In real Utopian communities, frequently patriarchal, this is an actual person. Historically, nearly all Utopian experiments in the west have quickly molded themselves around patriarchal figures. In literary Utopias, the authority is the prophet who set up the Utopia. Often the prophet is invoked in conversations as a guide to proper, right-thinking behavior.

  5. Social regulation through guilt. Social responsibility is exalted as the standard of behavior. Frequently the authority figure is the focus of guilt-inducing rules. Once the authority figure dies, he or she becomes a virtual saint-like figure. Guilt is used to the extreme of controlling people's actions in detail, serving as the constant standard and overseer of the citizen's actions.

  These five points outline a constellation of values which utopists often unconsciously assume.

  Before backing up these points with specifics, consider some Utopias which don't share all or most of them. Samuel Delany's Triton seems to have none of these features; indeed, it proclaims itself a "heterotopia," stressing its disagreement with the first point. Often Delany depicts societies which express his delight in the freakish. Franz Werfel's Star of the Unborn (1946) depicts a heavily technological future with many desirable aspects, while accepting the inevitability of war, rebellion, and unsavory aspects. Advanced technology is carefully weighed for its moral implications in Norman Spinrad's Songs from the Stars.

  Nonreactionary, or genuinely progressive Utopias, often reject regulation through guilt. This divides Utopias roughly along the axis of European vs. American, with the Europeans typically favoring "social conscience"—a term that often just means guilt.

  Consider Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (the most prominent Amerian Utopia of the 19th century) and William Morris's reply to it, News from Nowhere. Both stabilize society more through gratification of individual needs than through guilt. Indeed, one of the keys to American politics is just this idea. Huxley's Island (written after his move to California) sides more with gratification, though of course his Brave New World (written in England) depicts the horrific side of a state devoted to gratification without our "sentimental" humanist principles.

  LeGuin as Reactionary

  Utopists often thought to be forward-looking, chic, and left-wing may be in fact reactionary. Consider, for example, Ursula LeGuin. Arguably her The Dispossessed is the finest American Utopian novel of our time, and much of her work touches on these issues.

  A first clue comes from the strangely 19th-century middle-European "feel" of her background society in The Dispossessed. This gives a curious static flavor, and of course recalls her reverence for the European tradition of Utopian thought.

  Her Utopian experiment on the world Anarres is strikingly technophobic. Except for minor intrusions of a faster-than-light communicator and interplanetary travel (old SF st
aples), there is little which suggests the future at all. The vague middle-European feel to the architecture, organization of work, etc. is clearly nostalgic; rural Europe itself isn't even like that anymore. Plainly the author disapproves of the techno-flash and dazzle of the opposite world, Urras.

  There, Shevek can't connect with the womanly embodiment of Urras's temptation, and he symbolically spills his seed on the ground before her. Indeed, after this novel LeGuin saw space travel as "a bunch of crap flying around the world, just garbage in the sky."[1] NASA's planetary missions, or Shevek's science, can be clean, serene. Technology, though, is practical, dirty, and liable to fall into the wrong hands.

  We learn that the Hainish, who began the colony worlds, are burdened and driven by some strange guilt. Considering their superiority in so many fields, it is difficult not to conclude that LeGuin feels we should regard their guilt as admirable, too. This book is the culmination of her Utopian thinking, a path which leads through the short story, "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas." (This parable might be titled "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelettes," because we know what it takes to make one—you must break some eggs.)

  The Dispossessed reeks with Old-Testament themes and images, using guilt as the principal social control. The founder, Odo, is the central saint of a communal society. Her pain and suffering during nine years' imprisonment make possible the virtue of the later Anarres society. Citizens remind each other of the events and connect her suffering with their dedication.

  The implied lesson is that Utopia will not arrive until man comes to grips with his own inner nature, which means in turn that a citizen is born guilty. This is central. Citizens must repay Odo's pain with their submission to the general will and society's precepts. Living on Anarres has an uncanny resemblance to being nagged by your mother.

  The marriage vows in Castro's Cuba explicitly require a couple to raise all children according to "socialist morality." On Anarres a child is not a true citizen, psychically, until he has undergone a guilt-inducing experience—an unconscious, implicit rite.[2] Both processes seek to induce early control. The crucial scene in the protagonist Shevek's childhood is the boy's imprisonment game, described in careful detail. (This incident is clearly central, an act of juvenile delinquency taking up more space than Shevek's entire courtship of his wife!)

  Odo is clearly the guilt-inducing authority figure which appears so often in reactionary Utopias, though she is not the customary type: male, dynamic, assertive. Odo dies just before her Utopia begins (see the short story "The Day Before the Revolution") and has some resemblance to LeGuin herself. It is interesting, then, that Odo avoided the problems of building a real Utopia, for LeGuin does this too.

  Reading the Silences

  There is a further method of investigating Utopian writings, after first applying the litmus test of the above characteristics: reading the author's silences.

  Plausibly, the yearning which motivates a writer to construct a Utopia, devoting narrative energy to it, will in turn lead the author to neglect certain disturbing problems. The novel then reflects the author's avoidance of crucial questions that arise naturally from the imagined world. Conscious avoidance (or, more importantly, unconscious neglect) of these tells us what the writer fears and feels uncomfortable with. We might then expect the inhabitants of a Utopia also never to think of the blind areas in their own society.

  The principal ignored problem of Anarres is the problem of evil and thus violence; to LeGuin they are often synonymous. Guilt ("social conscience") simply overcomes such discordant elements. In the middle of a drought in which people starve no matter how evenly food is shared, somehow no one thinks of taking up arms with some friends and seizing, say, the grain reserves. Similarly, there is no on-stage evidence in The Dispossessed of hardened criminals, insane people, or naturally violent types (indeed, violence is "unnatural," and an impulse toward it is the principal offense which calls up guilt). There is a "prison camp" for "undesirables," evidence for the ambiguity of this Utopia. But people seem to go there for offenses such as writing unpopular plays or, perhaps, voting Republican.

  LeGuin's silence is conspicuous. This arouses the suspicion that the shying away from violence of any sort is part and parcel of the emotional posture of which The Dispossessed is only one reflection.

  Tolstoy is the obvious father of many of LeGuin's ideas, techniques, and even literary mannerisms. As Samuel R. Delany has remarked in "To Read The Dispossessed,"[3] whenever LeGuin begins to discuss politics (a common occasion) or show it (quite rare), she uses a language which ". . . sentence by sentence is pompous, ponderous, and leaden." He surmises that her style owes much to the Victorian translations of the great European novels, and that when she attempts depth she unconsciously lapses into this voice. These are "signs of a 'European' or 'Russian' profundity that the (translated) texts do not have." (This brilliant essay stresses the micro-text and ignores the book's principal strength, its beautiful structuring. As Delany deftly shows, hidden assumptions or avoided problems often show up best at the sentence or even phrase level. He also misses some of the lovely passages which her style achieves.)

  Why Tolstoy? He, as well as the Russian anarchist Prince Kropotkin, took an absolutist position—no cooperation with any state control which used force. It is worth noting that the home of much idealist anarchist thinking, Russia, is now the largest prison state in history. One suspects that this comes in part from the inability of the 19th-century socialist thinkers there to confront the problem of violence in any moderate way.

  One would then expect LeGuin's Anarres to evolve, if it ever slipped free of the authorial hand, in the direction of 19th-century Russia—without, of course, the apparatus of the Czar, etc. These are the roots of modern totalitarianism.

  Failing to confront the problem of evil and violence gives these forces more power, not less. A quite plausible outcome, then, would see the reduction of Anarres to warring camps, each promising to restore order and ideological purity, perhaps even concluding with a Bolshevik-style victory.

  LeGuin attempts to finesse this entire problem. It doesn't work. Her ignoring of a remarkable historical parallel (the demise of Russian socialist idealism at the hands of Lenin) marks The Dispossessed as a deeply reactionary work, concerned more with repealing history than with understanding it to make a better future.

  This came up recently when I was discussing Soviet SF with one of the principal SF critics there. Appropriately enough, it was a cold day in 1984 and we were crossing Red Square beneath a leaden sky threatening snow. He remarked that The Dispossessed was not translated into Russian, in part because it referred to ideas the regime didn't like. Then he said rather wistfully, "For us, you know, it is terribly nostalgic. And irrelevant. That's the way some thought it could be, back in the beginning."

  LeGuin seems to have tentatively approached the problem of real-world violence in the cartoon version of real politics depicted in The Eye of the Heron. There, descendants of the Mafia confront nonviolent anarchists in highly implausible fashion, leading to retreat of the anarchists into the wilderness—a note oddly reminiscent of many American escape-adventures. One must conclude that LeGuin can hardly bear to confront this crucial issue, and when she does sees no solution.

  But there seems to me a deeper reason for LeGuin's silence about the realities of the world: fundamentally, the real world does not matter.

  As the British critic Roz Kaveny has remarked in a review of Malafrena, "Throughout there is the sense that fills all of LeGuin's work: that politics is important less for what it can do for other people than as a way of achieving personal moral self-realization. Altruism is seen as good for its own sake and not because it may be useful to the under-privileged, although the altruist is supposed to be too busy to ever think in precisely those terms."

  A Utopia of hard-scrabbling scarcity solves so many problems quite cheaply. No worries of distribution of wealth, no leverage for power relationships. And it casts all in a superior li
ght: poor people can have few sins. Throughout, no one questions a system which produces poverty, because, after all, it provides lovely opportunities for sacrifice.

  A genuine revolutionary in such a place would be he who puts productivity over political theory. No such figure appears—another author's silence. But reality, after all, is not the principal concern of such narratives.

  So the crucial scene in The Eye of the Heron, in which anarchist confronts a Mafia thug and the protagonist dies, is skipped. We learn of it obliquely, via dialogue, in flashback. Partly this comes no doubt from her aversion for violence, but I suspect we are meant to see the moral grandeur of the survivors as the central fact. Even death is another way to strike a moral posture—or rather, to be seen doing so.

  Similarly, the street confrontations on Urras in The Dispossessed rang false to many reviewers, and for good reason: they are the only example of real-world political confrontation in the book, and LeGuin knows very little of such things.