Warm Words & Otherwise: A Blizzard of Book Reviews

by John Grant

  But it's an important factor nevertheless in one's enjoyment of the omnibus. For quite a long time while reading it I was thinking how superb it was to have the three novels available back to back, so we could experience the full impact of Engdahl's vision rather than absorbing it in diluted form through reading the novels separately and perhaps years apart. After a while, however, this view changed: I now wish I had indeed read the books separately, because there are so many moral dilemmas being raised here that eventually my brain began to suffer overload. A very good thing of course! And yet ...

  So I end up both heartily recommending this book and at the same time doing so with reservations. You will almost certainly come away enriched from Children of the Star, but you'll probably find the experience in some ways a gruelling one – this is not an easy read, in any sense of that term. Which is perhaps another way of saying it's an extremely good book.

  —Infinity Plus

  Enchantress from the Stars

  by Sylvia Louise Engdahl, foreword by Lois Lowry, illustrated by Leo & Diane Dillon

  Walker, 288 pages, hardback, 2001; illustrated reissue of a book originally published in 1970

  Right at the outset this reviewer should confess to having had a long-term love affair with this novel.

  At one stage during the 1970s I was sent from the UK on a six-week business trip to the USA, going to various cities. As one does, I picked up fistfuls of disposable paperbacks along the way, most of which got left in anonymous hotel rooms after serving as forgettable mind-fodder. One of them that I picked up, assuming it would be just a way of passing a lonely evening and probably better than American television, was the Atheneum paperback of Enchantress from the Stars. I can still vividly remember my astonishment on discovering – I think the view outside the hotel window was downtown Boston – that this was much more than the standard crud. Rather, it was a beautifully written and beautifully conceived book, one of the best sf novels I'd ever read – all the more remarkable, perhaps, in that it was obviously intended for older children rather than adults. It was one of the few books that travelled home with me to the UK, where I naively expected my peer group to be buzzing about it, on the everybody-else-already-knows-about-this-marvel-except-me principle.

  Not at all. I was alone in my enthusiasm: no one else around me knew the book at all. Over the years and eventually decades I reread it a few times, and was richly rewarded when my daughter grew to be of an age that she could enjoy it as much as I repeatedly did. Obviously I looked around in UK bookshops for other Engdahl titles, but – although I gather some others were indeed published in the UK – I was never lucky.

  It's been perhaps a decade since last I read Enchantress from the Stars, so the news that it was being reissued in a redesigned, re-illustrated and re-edited edition was received here at Snarl Towers with great delight. The delight intensified when the book itself arrived: this is an exquisitely lovely piece of design and production, a book made to be treasured forever, with extra copies bought to be given to special friends. The cover by the Dillons should be up for every relevant art award (their illustrations inside are fine, but not so exceptional); in addition, an award should be invented for the book's designer, Ellen Cipriano, whose work here is beyond even the Dillons'. This is one of those books you want to kiss from time to time when no one's looking, it's so beautifully made.

  But what of the novel itself? I was naturally a bit nervous about actually reading it. What if nostalgia had coloured the text beyond its real worth?

  I needn't have worried. This book is if anything even better than it was the last time I read it.

  Young (perhaps aged 20) Elana belongs to a galactic culture called the Federation whose technology and psychology are so far advanced beyond our own that they obey the Clarke law that "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". On an early page Engdahl spells out rather more explicitly her own, presumably independently derived, variant of this:

  It is by now a well known fact that the human people of the universe have similar histories – not that the specific details are similar, but the same patterns emerge on every home world. Each must pass through three stages: first childhood, when all is full of wonder, when man admits that much is unknown to him, calling it "supernatural", yet believing. Then adolescence, when man discards superstition and reveres science, feeling that he has charted its realms and has only to conquer them – never dreaming that certain "supernatural" wonders should not be set aside, but understood. And at last maturity, when the discovery is made that what was termed "supernatural" has been perfectly natural all along, and is in reality a part of the very science that sought to reject it.

  The folk of the Federation, in short, are completely familiar with their own technology – Elana doesn't regard any of the marvels she can perform using it as in any way remarkable – while at the same time they're empowered by various abilities that we, still in "adolescence", would regard as belonging to the credulous fringe, notably telepathy and psychokinesis. Yet the Federation people are not superhumans: as human beings they are as vulnerable as the rest of us ... and vulnerable not just physically but emotionally.

  One of the duties the Federation has taken upon itself is the succouring of Youngling civilizations – those still in the stages of "childhood" and "adolescence". This task it must perform completely unknown to the Youngling civilizations concerned, for it has been established that overt intervention – and anything on a major scale – is likely, however well intentioned, to deleteriously affect a civilization's continuing evolution towards the level the Federation enjoys.

  Elana is the daughter of a Federation field agent whose responsibility it is to silently assist selected Youngling cultures. With him and her assigned fiancé Evrek she is on her way to a family gathering when their starship is diverted to the planet Andrecia. The feudalist ("childhood") culture there is not yet aware that its world has been invaded by the advance party sent by a technological ("adolescence") culture, the Empire, which is intent on establishing a beachhead on Andrecia preparatory to colonizing the planet, with its aboriginals to be herded off into reservations. Elana's father is instructed to send down a team onto Andrecia in the hope of subtly and secretly tweaking affairs so that the Empire is induced to withdraw from the planet and leave the aboriginals to follow their own cultural-evolutionary course. By hook and crook Elana becomes part of that team.

  The Empire's military crew has come down in a remote forested area, where they are using a massive mechanism called the rockchewer to clear some terrain for the establishment of the first colony. Because of the rockchewer's long "neck", loud roars and habit of devouring everything in its path, the aboriginals believe it is a dragon. The local king, who emerges as being as brutal as anything you could expect from a feudal society – barbaric executions a speciality – accepts the offers of self-styled heroes to go slay the Dragon of the Enchanted Forest and rid his kingdom of it; their rewards should they succeed (and so far none has ever come back) will be the traditional ones, ranging from half the kingdom through to his daughter's hand in marriage ... or even all the king's wisdom, which is the reward sought by Georyn, the youngest of four sons of a woodcutter who resolve to kill the dragon and acquire glory.

  The Federation team of which Elana is part realizes that the weakness in the Empire's armour is its antipathy to "superstition"; if the Empire can be made to believe that at least some of the natives of Andrecia are capable of wielding magical forces then it will withdraw and hereafter regard the planet as fearful and taboo. Elana is therefore set to intercept Georyn and his brothers as they journey towards the king's court, and to find out if any of them have the aptitude to be given a rush course in the "supernatural" powers of the mind.

  Georyn and one of his brothers prove to have it, but the brother is soon killed by an Empire psychopath, and so all hopes rest on Georyn's fortitude if the dragon is to be slain and the Empire driven off ...

  What no one has r
eckoned on is that Elana and Georyn might fall in love, which they do despite the presence of Evrek as part of the Federation team. Their love, however, can never be allowed to reach fulfilment, for it would be as impossible for Elana to stay on Andrecia as it would be for Georyn to be plucked out of his own culture and introduced into the Federation: the cultural gap is simply too large.

  The tale of this inevitably frustrated romance is a large part of the appeal of Enchantress from the Stars (Elana is an enchantress in more than one sense), and of course the story of how Georyn in the end, through his own courage, eventually defeats the dragon is another.

  But the book is very much more than this. Ringing through its pages is an extraordinarily appealing faith in humanity – not in leaders or prophets, to be sure, but in common or garden human beings, whatever the level of the culture in which they happen to be fixed. Elana comes to learn that Georyn is in every way her moral and intellectual equal, despite the fact that he sees – can only see – his world in terms of enchantments and "supernatural" forces; and she learns that the same is true also of Jarel, a medic sent along as part of the Empire's expeditionary force: although his leaders believe in such retrogressive notions as conquest, he (and hence presumably countless other subjects of the Empire, who in a simplistic Star Wars-type scenario might be regarded as mere mindless clones, and thereby legitimate laser-fodder) believes the act the Empire is preparing to commit to be a deeply criminal one, and that the Empire's designation of the Andrecian aboriginals as "subhuman" is merely a trick of thinking designed to obscure the stark immorality of the Empire's plans. These (and much else there is no room to describe here) are deeper philosophical points than, alas, one is accustomed to encountering in children's sf.

  Another matter of significant interest about Enchantress from the Stars is the way its story is told. Most of the narrative is related in the first person by Elana, but large parts are told in the form of the much later legend the Andrecians have derived concerning the actions of the quasi-historic hero Georyn, who with the aid of an otherworldly Enchantress once slew a Dragon. As a result of this dual mode of telling (triple, really, because there are a few sections told in the third person) the novel has sometimes been described as a science fantasy or just as a fantasy. The fact of the matter is that it is neither of these: one of its many great achievements is that it is without a doubt a science-fiction novel, yet one which has a massive amount to say about the emergence and evolution of fantasy and legend. Metafiction is, thus, a primary component of this book; and yet there's no sense that anything so pompous-seeming is being thrust upon the reader, for Enchantress from the Stars never stops being a riveting tale, and can be fully enjoyed on that level alone.

  Enchantress from the Stars was originally published as a children's book, and thereby failed to gain the more widespread recognition it so manifestly deserved; it received a Newbery Honor in 1971 and the Phoenix Award in 1990, but has generally been ignored in sf/fantasy circles. The new and lovingly created reissue is likewise aimed at the children's market. This is a sensible decision from the commercial viewpoint, because it's likely to sell ten times as many copies that way; but this time round, hopefully, it will be recognized also as not just a novel for young adults but also as one of sf's great classics. The only possible complaint one can make is that, after finishing it, you will likely find yourself disinclined for a while to pick up anything else in the genre for fear it will, as it were, taste of ashes.

  In sum, it is almost impossible to convey how good this book is. Please just read it.

  —Infinity Plus

  Time Traveling with Science and the Saints

  by George A. Erickson

  Prometheus, 177 pages, hardback, 2003

  The thesis of this short book is stated succinctly in its Afterword: "History reveals that religion in general and Christianity in particular [have] retarded social and scientific progress and been the source of immeasurable woe." The book is thus a staunch rebuttal, reinforced by copious historical examples, of the commonly held fallacy that, despite all the multitudinous evils committed in its name, Christianity has overall been a civilizing factor.

  Erickson begins his historical analysis by discussing the fate of Giordano Bruno, the 16th-century freethinking cleric who was tortured and burnt at the stake as a heretic for espousing and promoting the Copernican hypothesis. And it is upon the Church's still continuing and often horrendously bloody struggle to suppress scientific endeavour that Erickson, quite rightly, chooses almost exclusively to concentrate; for science, despite the frequently flawed behaviour of its establishment (as witness the derision heaped upon Wegener for advocating the notion of continental drift), is almost by definition ever in the vanguard of free thought, and, without the technology that science brings in its wake, freedom of thought must often be subjugated to the simple struggle to survive.

  It is certainly the case that, as Erickson amply demonstrates, when science ushered in the Enlightenment, the thinkers of that era were merely picking up where the ancient Greeks had left off fifteen hundred years earlier. And it is also certainly the case, as he again demonstrates, that this 1500-year diaspora of indescribable misery and appalling brutality was largely imposed upon the West by the doctrines of the Christian churches and their imposition, often through the agency of secular tyrants, by supposedly Christian establishments whose primary goal was worldly gain and who had no interests in the teachings of Christ except insofar as they could be perverted in order to facilitate that goal.

  During that 1500-year-long nightmare there were of course the obvious Christianity-inspired slaughters of the innocents: the Crusades, the Inquisition, the witch-hunts, the Thirty Years' War. What go less generally recognized are the other casualties caused by the repression of scientific advance. The violence-enforced bans not just on medical experimentation and research but also even on medical speculation killed countless millions. The prohibitions on work in the physical sciences – of which Copernicus's seemingly pure-theory deductions were a part – crippled engineering and other life-saving technologies, thereby causing countless more millions of unnecessary deaths. Deaths aside, the sheer human misery engendered by the theistic tyranny is incalculable.

  Erickson retains the full force of his rhetoric for the modern proponents of religion-based ignorance and stupidity in the West. The final two sections of his final chapter offer a devastatingly effective piece of polemic directed against the modern forces of intellectual repression, from Pope John Paul II and President George W. Bush on downwards, and in defence of those who, often shamefully beleaguered, pursue freedom of thought. He mercilessly exposes the nonsense of those who describe Creationism as a "science"; of those who ban birth control yet take no responsibility for the inevitably ensuing bastards, poverty, suffering and starvation; of those who use the words of the Prince of Peace as a justification for war and genocide; of those who make the laughable claim that in order to preserve freedom of thought we must suppress it. Here is Erickson on Ronald Reagan:

  Ronald Reagan, perhaps the least intelligent man to ever be elected president until George W. Bush, felt comfortable appointing fundamentalist James Watt to be the Secretary of the Interior despite Watt's apocalyptic belief that led him to advise Congress not to worry over environmental issues because, "I don't know how many future generations we can count on until the Lord returns."

  It is shameful that we elect men like Reagan, who once inquired, "Why should we subsidize intellectual curiosity?"

  The "intellectual curiosity", one need hardly add, that led to the development of the camera and motion pictures.

  Though compulsively readable, the book is not without its flaws. Because of its brevity it must naturally miss some highlights during its brief trip through scientific and religious history – although it does, to its credit, cover all the major bases. On one or two occasions the text seems slightly jumbled, as if Erickson had been interrupted a few times while making his final revisions, so that a sente
nce seems to be in the wrong place on its page. There's a bizarre tendency to use the spelling "eigthteenth", and Sir Humphry Davy is described repeatedly as "Sir Davy". Erickson says that Priestley, on discovering oxygen, called it "phlogiston"; of course, Priestley called his new-discovered gas "dephlogisticated air", believing that it had been deprived of the theoretical (in fact, imaginary) substance phlogiston posited by Stahl a few decades earlier to explain weight-change during combustion – it was Lavoisier who, being told by Priestley of the behaviour of "dephlogisticated air", leapt to the correct conclusion that air is made up of more than one gas.

  And there's one real chronological howler:

  In the end, the aging Copernicus entrusted his manuscript to a liberal Nuremberg cleric named Andreas Osiander, who knew that the Vatican theologian Cardinal Bellarmine had condoned, if not arranged, the murder of Giordano Bruno for holding similar views.

  Unfortunately for this statement, Bruno was burnt in 1600 while Copernicus died over half a century earlier, in 1543.

  It is to be hoped such matters will be corrected when the book reprints.

  Erickson nowhere explains the title of his book, but I choose to interpret it in the sense that we're being encouraged to participate in countless mental voyages of time travel in order to ask the question, not so much "what if?", as "what if not?" What if the Roman Catholic Church, later enthusiastically joined in the persecution of free thought by the Protestant churches, had not come to power – even, had not existed? It is almost incontestable that our civilization, for good or evil, would currently be at a level well ahead of where we are now. In this, of course, Erickson more than sufficiently makes his intended rebuttal; as a side-effect, he has also given us a book that serves as a possible source – almost a blueprint – for countless alternate history stories. It would even be reasonable to assert, although Erickson does not, that this book, through its depiction of the negative, itself depicts an alternative history-that-never-was. That alas never was.