Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance

The Story So Far

Baron Lucas Trask was once set to be the happiest man on Gram, with his wife Elaine Karvall; but their marriage was cut tragically short (indeed on the night it started) by the insane and yet oddly clever Andray Dunnan, Duke Angus’s nephew. As historically has been the case with nobility, and even the very rich of modern times, severe mental illness is allowed to go unchecked. Dunnan kills Elaine and hijacks the Enterprise (no, not that one), a prized ship, with a bunch of his most loyal followers. In a sense, Trask dies too that night, as he makes the decision to leave his barony behind and take up the mantle of a Space Viking, alongside Otto Harkaman, who’s friendly enough and liable to show Trask the ropes. Among the Sword-Worlds, of which Gram is one, the Space Vikings have a largely negative reputation attached to them—not a totally unjustified reputation either, since the Space Viking make their riches by plundering the semi-civilized Old Federation worlds. Looting, murdering, “the usual atrocities,” although curiously rape is punishable by death. Our Anti-Heroes™ decide to start setting up a base on the mostly depopulated world of Tanith, in which through some catastrophe most of the people had died out, yet their architecture remained in good condition. Trask’s original goal was simply to catch and kill Dunnan, after which he would probably commit suicide, but with Tanith he has found a new and more productive goal. The problem is that you can’t make an omelet without breaking some eggs, and the same goes for rebuilding a civilization. The cost of rebuilding will be a high one.

With a newly outfitted ship, christened the Nemesis, plus a few fellow Space Viking ships like the Space Scourge, Trask looks to gather resources, between simple plundering and diplomacy with other cultures. There is also, of course, some political backstabbing thrown into the mix. Indeed trading becomes preferrable to plundering, not least because of Trask’s traumatic first experiences with on-the-ground combat and the use of some insane firepower (a “hellburner” can literally turn a whole city into a scorched crater, and nuclear weapons are treated relatively flippantly in this setting), but also because it would be more practical to trade resources between Old Federation worlds. Some worlds are rich in metals or agriculture while others, like Beowulf, are rich in “fissionables,” needed for nuclear power and weapons. Ultimately everyone involved will benefit, such that (in an unlikely turn of events) Trask’s group makes peace with the Beowulfers despite having attacked and plundered them before. Gram has also become involved in the growing enterprise that is rebuilding Tanith, with Duke Angus becoming King Angus of Gram and Trask becoming Prince (prince to whom?) Trask of Tanith. Meanwhile, Dunnan has not only become a Space Viking himself, but has begun building his own fleet. At the beginning of this whole ordeal, Trask had nothing left to lose, but after six years he’s become worried about losing his pet project; on a more metaphysical level, he’s also become convinced that he will not see the pearly gates when he dies—probably true enough, given his numerous crimes.

Enhancing Image

Much of the third installment is concerned with, of all things, discussions over politics and economics. In case you’ve never read anything by Piper before, the overt right-wing slant can feel as though it comes out of nowhere; and yet unlike his close contemporary Robert Heinlein (who by the ’60s had become a Goldwater Republican), Piper is not so convinced of any “ideal” system of government—not even the so-called benevolent despots that Trask himself favors. (It’s worth remembering, as if it were possible to forget, that Trask is keenly aware of his own evil deeds, such that he regularly loses sleep over it.) Piper could be considered something of a right-wing anarchist, although his belief (or rather active disbelief) in government puts him on more similar ground with Robert E. Howard than Heinlein. Of course, Piper and Howard were both deeply pessimistic about humanity’s future, and both ended up shooting themselves. Finally, there’s a character introduced here who ends up reading as eerily prescient, although it’s sort of obvious who Piper would’ve been thinking of when he wrote this novel. But anyway, more on that whole business in a minute.

When talking about Marduk, the planet introduced in this installment, let’s talk a bit more about the Old Federation worlds and how, despite being segregated from the more advanced Sword-Worlds, they were by no means created equally. Some, like Beowulf and Gilgamesh, are technologically advanced enough that a few of the fellow Space Viking captains considered attaching the former to be taboo, because “you didn’t raid civilized planets, not and get away with it.” The subsequent battle with Beowulf proved this to be pretty sound advice, even if things worked out in the long run. Marduk is another one of these well-advanced Old Federation worlds that could be reasonable confused for one of the Sword-Worlds, although instead of feudalism the people opted for basically a constitutional monarchy—you might even call it a democracy. This doesn’t enthuse Trask at all. And yet Prince Simon Bentrick of Marduk, who Trask saves in the heat of a space battle and who befriends him despite their differing worldviews, turns out to be one of the most (indeed he’s one of the few) sympathetic characters we’ve met thus far, even if his belief in constitutional monarchy is framed as naive. The government is apparently bureaucratic as hell, and there’s even (in one of the novel’s few humorous moments) a deliberately convoluted explanation as to how things work on Marduk.

There is, however, a growing problem on this otherwise peaceable planet, which is the wannabe despot Zaspar Makann and his faction, the People’s Welfare Party. The best way to describe Makann politically would be that he seems economically left-leaning but socially very right-leaning. Textually he’s compared to Adolf Hitler (obvious, if also sensible comparison), but read this passage about him and try not to think of a few relatively modern figures in politics. It feels a little too accurate:

Makann was a raving lunatic, and all the followers he had were a handful of lunatics like him. He might be a lunatic, but he had a dangerously large following. Well, not so large; maybe they’d pick up a seat or so in the Assembly, but that was doubtful—not enough of them in any representative district to elect an Assemblyman. He was just a smart crook, milking a lot of half-witted plebeians for all he could get out of them. Not just plebes, either; a lot of industrialists were secretly financing him, in hope that he would help them break up the labor unions. You’re nuts; everybody knew the labor unions were backing him, hoping he’d scare the employers into granting concessions. You’re both nuts; he was backed by the mercantile interests; they were hoping he’d run the Gilgameshers off the planet.

Incidentally, there was already historic precedent in the US for a figure who ran on a similar platform to Makann, who was himself arguably a fascist. Huey Long was Governor and later a Senator for Louisiana, who may have even succeeded at a run for President, had he not been assassinated in 1935. The controversy over the extent of his borderline despotism (he all but ruled his state with an iron fist) and whether he really counted as a fascist (in terms of eceonomic policy he actually ran to the left of FDR), continues to this day, but no doubt Piper would’ve thought very dimly of him. (And yes, this is the part where I bring up Trump, namely in the coaxing of both anti-labor rich assholes and socially conservative trade unionists. The secuding of trade unions for what is ultimately an anti-labor fascist movement is unfortunately a reality we have to deal with.)

A Step Farther Out

Obviously we’re heading for something terrible with Makann and his goons, and this will somehow tie into Trask’s rebuilding of Tanith. The introductory blurb for the final installment alludes to Tanith being the success story that Trask will go down in history for, despite all the blood spilled for it. The political implications here are—let’s say curious. No doubt John W. Campbell was taken by Piper’s shared ambivalence toward democracy, not to mention their dim view of organized labor; but at the same time Piper’s politics were a lot more libertarian than conservative. There’s a distrust of both politicians and “the people,” and yet rather than put the feudalism of the Space-Worlds on a pedestal Piper posits that this system, too, will not last. So much in this world is transient already. Stylistically Space Viking fits well enough in Analog in the early ’60s, but there’s a palpable bleakness that sees it anticipating the overtly pessimistic SF we would start seeing late in the decade. I have to wonder what Piper would’ve done or how he would’ve reacted to the New Wave movement, which hadn’t quite started yet at the time of his death. It’s one of those little near-misses in the field’s history. I’m also curious how the final installment here will play out.

See you next time.

The Story So Far

Lucas Trask is dead, in a sense. He died when trying to save Elaine Karvall, his wife-to-be, from Andray Dunnan, a mad nobleman who’s convinced Elaine wants to marry him instead of Trask. Unfortunately for everyone, Dunnan is allowed free roam despite his mental illness being well-known, for he is Duke Angus’s nephew and that gives him a lot of leeway. Nobility and title matters a lot in this far future, where despite the prevalence of spaceships and robots, humanity has slipped back into feudalism. The worst part is that this is for the Sword-Worlds, which are relatively well-off. You could do worse and journey to one of the Old Federation planets, whose peoples have slipped even further into cultural backwardness. Civilization, in the world of Space Viking, is hard to build and easy to undo. Trask himself is a baron, set to connect with the industrial might of the Karvall family through Elaine; but Dunnan kills her and hijacks the Enterprise, a prized ship, with some devoted supporters of his. Within just an hour, Trask’s whole world has fallen apart, and now the only thing he cares about is catching and killing the son of a bitch who ruined his life.

Even with the help of Otto Harkaman, a veteran Space Viking, the question of tracking down the Enterprise soon proves to be a hard one. The Space Vikings are not so much a group of people as a certain lifestyle, which many would say is odious, if also requiring of bravery. The Space Vikings are used to plundering and setting up bases on Old Federation worlds, where the people may be backwards, but where certain planets may be rich in materials needed for, say, the hyperdrive. (These forgotten planets with their “primitive” cultures generally don’t have spaceships, and even if they do they don’t have ones capable of FTL travel, hence the hyperdrive being very important.) Trask decides to become a Space Viking himself in pursuit of his goal, although he has some very harsh life lessons to learn. With a new ship, christened the Nemesis, Trask and Harkaman think they’ve found the Enterprise, but instead find the Space Scourge and the Lamia, home to fellow Space Vikings, near the planet Tanith. Some unknown calamity had mostly depopulated the planet, which makes it perfect for building a base. Task comes to the conclusion that since chasing Dunnan all over space would be impractical, it might be better to spend years building a base on Tanith and wait for the party to come to him.

Enhancing Image

To say Trask is an anti-hero would be putting it a bit mildly. Space Vikings are, by their “code,” self-serving and not heroic in any sense. Trask, being new to this whole thing, is convinced to send the Nemesis down on Khepera, a planet whose people only have semi-modern fighting equipment. Building a base means farming resources, and for a Space Viking farming resources means plundering neighboring worlds. The battle on Khepera is rather one-sided. Trask and Paytrik Morland, a fellow nobleman, land and see some of the carnage first-hand. There’s a passage that’s pretty haunting, not to mention brutal, in which we see a local man cradling a dead woman, presumably his wife, “half her head […] blown off.” What Trask does next is disturbing and telling. See here:

“Poor devil,” Morland said, and started forward.

“No.”

Trask stopped him with his left hand. With his right, he drew his pistol and shot the man dead. Morland was horrified.

“Great Satan, Lucas! Why did you do that?”

“I wish Andray Dunnan had done that for me.” He thumbed the safety on and holstered the pistol. “None of this would be happening if he had. How many more happinesses do you think we’ve smashed here today? And we don’t even have Dunnan’s excuse of madness.”

The “fighting” and subsequent sacking of this city and the following one on Khepera alone would justify a war crimes tribunal, but there doesn’t seem to be such a thing in the world of the novel. Trask and his men can take what they want with little in the way of repercussions, aside from the predictable casualties on their end. This brutality is something Trask is vividly aware of, to the point where he has latent attacks of conscience on some nights in the midst of sleep—nightmares and visions of his dead beloved staring at him in stark horror. Yet there is no stopping or averting it. Trask figures he will go to Hell when he dies, if there is such a thing; on some nights he’s convinced he’s convinced he has already died and gone there. Nowadays we would probably call Trask passively suicidal.

Of course, nowadays we would call Space Viking “grimdark.” It might be one of the earliest examples in the field. Reading it I’m reminded of Warhammer 40,000, albeit without that franchise’s fantasy elements and very dark (as you would expect) sense of humor.

Now, the business of gathering resources isn’t all bad, or at least horrific. There are, in fact, some cultures in the Old Federation where it’s possible to negotiate, and even trade, rather resorting to brute force. The most curious of these more “civilized” cultures introduced in this installment would have to be the Gilgameshers, a non-aggressive “theo-Socialistic” people who have bartering and haggling as pillars of their culture. They have spaceships, but not FTL travel. They’re also religious zealots, and look on non-believers as somewhat barbaric at best. In other words, they’re a pain to deal with, but at least they don’t pose a direct threat to Trask’s project. (I should mention here that Piper was an avowed atheist whose ambivalence towards organized religion was surprisingly overt for 1950s America. This was another thing he had in common with John W. Campbell, although, of course, they made sure not to have any badmouthing regarding Christianity in the text.) The opportunity to not wipe entire cities off the map actually means a lot in this future, where apparently nuclear weapons are sort of commonplace. Like I said, this reads as grimdark.

By the end of this installment, six years have passed since that fateful night, almost in the blink of an eye. Also by this point, Trask and his crew have killed thousands, probably well over a million people through bombings alone, never mind the boots-on-the-ground sacking of cities. This is all in the name of one day encountering a single man, who, rumor has it, has been gathering resources on his own end and staying in hiding, not wanting to meet Trask head-on. All the more reason to build up Tanith’s might. Have I mentioned this novel is bleak?

A Step Farther Out

When reading Piper, it can be tempting to read into things and find “clues” about what was apparently his deteriorating mental state. In the case of Space Viking this is all too much a temptation, since this is looking to be one of the most hopeless SF novels of its era. It may turn out to be Piper’s darkest novel, and the fact that it finished serialization less than two years before his death doesn’t help. I’m halfway through it now, and while I’m enjoying it quite a bit, it’s not an easy novel to recommend. I’m curious as to how the plot is gonna progress past this point, given the second installment’s somewhat episodic structure and constant grimness.

See you next time.

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, try steering him away) 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.