The Story So Far

A space battle with the Enterprise (which conspicuously does not have Andray Dunnan aboard when it’s destroyed) leaves the Nemesis damaged, as well as a newly allied ship stuck on its home planet for repairs. Said ship belongs to Marduk, one of the most civilized planets in the Old Federation, as they not only have a functioning and reasonable form of government (a constitutional monarchy) but a space navy that’s well-equipped to defend the planet. Lucas Trask has some rather sour feelings about how business gets done on Marduk, but he’s found a new ally for his Tanith project, and he even comes to befriend some of people, most notably Prince Simon Bentrik. He has some lofty ideas about the role of government, but Bentrik is by no means a softy or a coward; if anything he’s eager to learn, with Trask as both a friend and mentor figure. Trask has the notion of using the Old Federation worlds as trading partners to help build Tanith, without any involvement from the Sword-Worlds. Gram, Trask’s homeworld, is becoming increasingly mired in tyranny (Duke [now King] Angus has apparently gone mad with poower), but Trask has no interest in returning. After several years of being a Space Viking and having formed good relations with some of the Federation worlds, Trask seems to have “gone native,” as it were. Just as well, since he still needs to hunt down Dunnan.

There’s also the more immediate problem of Marduk, which sees its government inadvertently take after the last days of the Weimar Republic. There’s a new populist figure on the rise. Zaspar Makann was a nobody just five years ago, but now he’s the head of an increasingly popular political party, called the People’s Welfare Party. Makann has become so popular in the past year, with an increasingly discontent voting populace, that there’s a decent chance he’ll become Chancellor. God knows what sort of hell will break out if that happens. Makann seems to be running on economically left-leaning but socially right-leaning policy, using nationalism and racism (using the Gilgameshers as scapegoats, since they’re already a deeply unpopular minority group) to rile up the masses. This all sounds rather familiar, as Trask has been doing some reading on old Earth history. There was something about the Weimar Republic and the Nazi party. There was also something about a Reichstag fire in 1933…

Enhancing Image

It’s in the final stretch of Space Viking that Piper’s pessimism becomes most overt, and where it also ties together with a coherent message. The idea (I’m paraphrasing a bit from a passage here) is that everything that can happen has already happened somewhere, at some point in humanity’s past. There is nothing new under the sun. Trask has been doing some reading, and he comes to suspect that given the speed of Makann’s rise to power, there must be someone even more powerful backing him. This “big lie,” which is really a long shot to get Trask’s allies to mobilize, turns out to be true—quite conveniently so. It’s been a hot minute since we had last since seen Dunnan, and indeed it’s been since the second installment that we had last even heard from him. By this point, Dunnan’s become a Space Viking himself and built a fleet of crazed followers, and has been secretly using Makann as a puppet to establish power on Marduk. The old saying goes that as a Space Viking one can’t conquer a civilized planet, which might be true as far as the usual tactics go, but what about conquering a civilized world from the inside? Suppose Dunnan were to use Marduk’s own democratic processes against it? Piper’s not very subtle about how he feels about democracy, since he has Bentrick (who, in his defense, had just narrowly escaped being captured and killed) say this near the end of the novel:

“There’s something wrong with democracy. If there weren’t, it couldn’t be overthrown by people like Makann, attacking it from within by democratic procedures. I don’t think it’s fundamentally unworkable. I think it just has a few of what engineers call bugs. It’s not safe to run a defective machine till you learn the defects and remedy them.”

As Trask (and by extension Piper) is quick to retort with, however, feudalism is pretty far from ideal as an alternative. Trask is formerly a Sword-Worlder, and the Sword-Worlders are pretty confident in their being more civilized than the rough-edged Old Federation worlds; but ultimately the novel makes the point that the line between “civilized” and “uncivilized” is a pretty blurry one, if not utterly arbitrary. By the end of the novel, Gram has become somewhat decivilized, having succumbed to despotism, while Tanith is said to be on the rise. I say “said” and not “shown,” because there’s a lot of telling in this novel with relatively little to show for it. The paperback comes to about 190 or 200 pages, almost a novella by today’s standards, but there’s a good 400 pages’ worth of plot and maybe 50 pages’ worth of description. As with a lot of SF novels of this vintage, Space Viking feels like an abridged version of itself, somewhat to its detriment.

I mentioned before that Piper has a sort of kinship with Robert E. Howard, and that’s aside from their tempraments, their tragic deaths, and even the fact that they were only a couple years apart in age (one has to wonder if they might’ve interacted, had Howard not died as young as he did, given they would’ve been close contemporaries). There’s also this shared belief that the “natural” state of mankind is barbarism, or rather the belief that civilization, good as it might be, is only transient. Going back to that conversation Trask and Bentrik have, there’s a telling (if rather blunt) little speech Trask goes on that sums up the novel’s ideas:

“It may just be […] that there is something fundamentally unworkable about government itself. As long as Homo sapiens terra is a wild animal, which he has always been and always will be until he evolves into something different in a million or so years, maybe a workable system of government is a political science impossibility, just as transmutation of elements was a physical-science impossibility as long as they tried to do it by chemical means.”

Man is basically an animal, and when an animal contracts rabies it has to be put down. So goes with Dunnan, who seems to be delusional enough, even years later, that not only does he still think Elaine is alive but that she means to marry him; it’s unclear if Dunnan is aware he had even shot Elaine back then, but it doesn’t matter. The final onslaught on Marduk ends up being an anticlimax, since Makann gets killed offscreen (sitting on the king’s throne with half his head blown off) while Trask summarily executes Dunnan after having smoked out his few remaining goons. Dunnan himself puts up no real fight, and Trask, despite having waited years for the moment, comes to not think much of it. “It had been like shooting a snake, or one of the nasty scorpion-things that infested the old buildings in Rivington. Just no more Andray Dunnan.” The original reason for Trask giving up his old life and going on looting as a Space Viking now feels inconsequentiall, as nobody is likely to remember who Dunnan even was. Trask’s revenge is framed as more or less justified, but it’s not glorious. Piper’s attempt at giving Trask a happy ending after all is said and done reads as a bit disingenuous, but then this would otherwise be too despondent.

A Step Farther Out

Sure, there are some problematic elements (it’s hard to believe people will be casually smoking pipes in spaceships a few centuries from now), but it holds up better than some novels of the era I can name that are easier to find in the wild. Most of the novels to be serialized in Astounding/Analog which garnered a lot of love and attention from fans at the time have long since fallen to the wayside, but Space Viking is an example of a pretty solid novel to not have gotten much attention at the time either. ISFDB lists only a couple contemporary reviews for it, and it’s totally possibly it got overshadowed by Piper’s paperback originals, especially Little Fuzzy. It being also probably Piper’s darkest novel would doubly make it hard to sell someone on it. But I would call Space Viking an almost-classic from that dark period between the ’50s boom-and-bust and the New Wave era. Piper fascinates me too much as a pulpy but serious-minded writer.

See you next time.