Who Goes There?

Henry Beam Piper is surely one of the more unusual characters to emerge on the scene right after the end of World War II, and incidentally he died right before the coming of the New Wave. He was born in 1904, but didn’t make his debut until 1947, with the story “Time and Time Again.” Over the next decade his output was sporadic, as he had a day job as railroad security; but once he was let go from that job he started writing full-time, and so his output in the past half-dozen years of his life hiked impressively. The early ’60s saw a late bloom for Piper of the sort that doesn’t come to most writers. Despite all this, there was trouble in his midst. He married late in life, and by all accounts his marriage was both short-lived and miserable. His agent also died suddenly, without having informed him of the sales of several of his works, which led him to believe his career was floundering. Being behind on payments from his writing, without a regular job at this point, and being reluctant to ask those who knew him for financial assistance, Piper decided to take one of the many guns he owned and commit suicide in November 1964. He left behind several unpublished works, including the novel Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen and two sequels to Little Fuzzy. His career had in fact reached a high point, but he didn’t know it.

Space Viking is a standalone novel set in a larger future history, sharing the setting with Little Fuzzy and The Cosmic Computer, among others. Piper had established two expanded universes that supposedly are tied together, although I’ve yet to find clear evidence of this. One is the Federation future history, of which Space Viking is a part; the other is the Paratime Police series, which is older in origin and which contains Lord Kalvan of Otherwhen. The Piper I’ve read tends to be set on Earth (most of the Piper I’ve read is from the Paratime series), but Space Viking is decidedly a space opera. Only a quarter in, but I’m rather interested.

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Analog Science Fiction, November 1962 to February 1963. It first appeared in book form as an Ace paperback later in 1963. Like most of Piper’s work, Space Viking is in the public domain, so you can read the serial version on Project Gutenberg. There are a few exceptions to this: some rascal (I think John F. Carr) keeps a grip on what little of Piper’s fiction that has not since fallen out of copyright.

Enhancing Image

In the distant future, humanity has conquered the stars, fallen into disrepair, and then recovered—somewhat. We are evidently on the other end of a long galactic dark age, what with the Old Federation and all that. Mankind, in its somewhat rejuvenated state, has collectively come to the conclusion (or at least the most powerful people have) that Space Feudalism™ is the way to go. Barones, dukes, and whatnot, are BACK. This is important context, since Lucas Trask is himself a baron, set to marry Elaine Karvall, the daughter of a big (like multi-planet) industrialist. Lucas thinks this is about to be the best day of his life, but he’ll be proved tragically wrong in a minute. See, since the aristocracy has made a huge comeback, you have people with titles, prestige, and positions of power they’re totally unqualified for. Andray Dunnan is one such person, being Duke Angus’s nephhew, and he’s convinced Elaine is in love with him despite the fact that they’ve barely interacted and Elaine’s betrothal to Lucas being well-known. He’s full of paranoid delusions, and yet he’s convinced that his own reality supercedes objective reality. “Yes, in his own private dream-world, a world of fantasy that had now become Andray Dunnan’s reality, in which an Elaine Karvall whom his imagination had created existed only to love him. Confronted by the real Elaine, he simply rejected the reality.” You may be wondering how such a clearly dangerous man (his condition is notorious enough that several people, including Sesal, Elaine’s dad) could amass a number of people who follow his orders. This is a question we’re still trying to figure out in the real world. Alex Gorram, a shipbuilder, even asks why Andray has not been put in psychiatric care, but we’re not given an answer.

Unfortunately today is the day where what’s little of Andray’s self-control snaps, and it doesn’t help that Elaine makes the mistake of trying to break through his delusions to his face. What ensues is a shootout in which Elaine gets mercifully fridged; to add insult to injury, Lucas’s attempt at saving her, but tackling and trying to cover her, may well have (through no fault of Lucas’s own) put her directly in Andray’s dodgy line of fire. Not only does Andray kill Elaine, but he and his goons steal the Enterprise (no, not that one), Otto Harkaman’s prized ship. This is a mistake one Andray’s part, considering Otto is a Space Viking, one of those nomadic roving spacemen who, like their namesake, are fond of plundering and pillaging. Space Vikings are not an ethnic or cultural group, but rather to become a Space Viking means a certain lifestyle and worldview. Anyone with the guts and metal can become a Space Viking. (I should mention here that some characters have rather unusual names, and that it’s easy to asssume that like with Piper’s other Federation stories, mankind in this future is decidedly multi-racial.) Lucas decides to take up with Otto and become a Space Viking, with a new ship of his own to match. He considers naming this new ship after Elaine, but rightly comes to conclusion that this would be a bad idea. He goes through a few names (I think Vendetta is the best one), but decides that Nemesis will be the right name for such a ship. He will, after all, be using said ship to hunt down Andray to the ends of the universe.

Something I couldn’t help but think about while reading the opening stretch of Space Viking is how in some ways it reads similarly to Dune—not Piper’s fault, or Frank Herbert’s fault, since the two were writing these novels around the same time, and indeed Dune World (the first chunk of the first novel) only appeared in Analog about a year after Piper’s novel. You have a spacefaring humanity with a weirdly retrograde form of government, although unlike the world of Dune there are robots in Space Viking. You have a young man who comes from nobility, but whose life gets turned upside down when someone close to him gets killed by a fellow noble. There young nobleman then follows a path to becoming an anti-hero, or maybe even a villain, all in the name of revenge. Eugenics (characters are being quite literal when they talk about “the best Sword-Sword genes,” although in-context that also works as metaphor) is treated as gospel. There’s generally a retrograde attitude about everything, despite the laser-guns and spaceships, what with the Sword-Worlds being named after famous swords (Excalibur, Durendal, Flamberge, etc.). There’s even a major character with a last name that sounds similar to Harkonnen. It borders on what some call Raygun Gothic, although I’m not sure how to feel about that label. Also like Dune (and I mean this as a positive), the values and tech in Space Viking combine to make a setting that doesn’t take obvious cues from any one time period or place; in that sense it’s aged better than most of its peers.

There Be Spoilers Here

The Nemesis is unable to keep up with the Enterprise, in no small part because these are sister ships, with near-identical designs, and there’s no way for one to outrun the other. Eventually it becomes a question as to where the bastard could’ve gone. Lucas and Otto decide to land on the planet Tanith, a planet that used to be “civilized” but which has since been driven back almost into the primordial soup from whence the whole world came. The buildings are still there, for the most part, but the city they come to has been largely depopulated. How did this happen? Only theories. Tanith is one of those planets in the Old Federation, so in other words the sort of planet that’s been left behind or scorned. I said before that the world of Space Viking doesn’t follow a linear progression with how people act or what tech they have access to, but in keeping with Piper’s right-wing pessimistic view of the world, civilization seems to wax and wane, like the tides. “Civilization,” as we understand it (and after all, what is civilization? and how do we know when we see it?), is surprisingly easy to undo, according to Piper. All it might take is for the wrong people to be removed from the equation, or for de-civilization via something like a plague.

To take Otto’s words:

“It takes an awful lot of people, working together at an awful lot of jobs, to keep a civilization running. Smash the installations and kill the top technicians and scientists, and the masses don’t know how to rebuild and go back to stone hatchets. Kill off enough of the masses and even if the planet and the know-how is left, there’s nobody to do the work. I’ve seen planets that decivilized both ways. Tanith, I think, is one of the latter.”

Of course, Piper does that old-timey SF thing where planets are treated like countries, countries are treated like cities, and so on. It’s an easy trap to fall into; but still, we’re not given that vivid an idea as to the scale of all this. I’ll get used to it, if only because it’s a problem one often finds with space opera so there’s not much of a point in harping on it, but you can do more with it than what Piper does here.

A Step Farther Out

Probably not the best choice for first Piper Federation story, although this is not my first rodeo with this future history—just the longest so far. Actually with Piper and the Federation universe I recommend tracking down the collection Federation, or rather the stories in that collection, since I think they’re all in the public domain. Unlike most Piper I’ve read up to this point, Space Viking stays true to its title by being both spacefaring and unsparing in its violence. Also, unusually for Piper, there doesn’t seem to be a woman in sight who lasts longer than five minutes. The Nemesis is very much a boys’ club, and landing on the semi-wild Tanith is not looking to change this. Still, I’m liking it a fair bit so far. Piper isn’t a wordsmith exactly, but he’s an earnest speculator of the sort John W. Campbell would’ve liked, and he’s a more fluid storyteller than most of the authors who appeared in Astounding/Analog at the time.

See you next time.