Who Goes There?

Gordon R. Dickson was born in 1923, in Canada, but moved with his family to the US when he was 13. He studied at the University of Minnesota and, unlike his close friend and fellow writer Poul Anderson, served in WWII, in the army. Despite being a few years older than Anderson, Dickson did not make his genre debut until a few year after Anderson did, and his earliest years as a writer were not as notable. By the late ’50s, however, Dickson had devised a series that he would work on sporadically over the next few decades, and which would become his life’s work: the Childe Cycle. Sadly left incomplete at the time of his death, in the sense that he never got around to fleshing out the lore as much as he had planned, the Childe Cycle is comprised of novels and shorter fiction, each story standing more or less on its own. Some of Dickson’s most beloved fiction comes from this series, and he even won two Hugos because of it. Again unlike Anderson, who became a noted hawk (albeit with a strong libertarian bent) as the Cold War escalated, Dickson’s views on war are more nuanced, maybe having been influenced by his own wartime experiences. With Dickson there is almost a paradoxical combination of his respect for the soldier as a profession and his seeming belief that peaceful negotiations are ideal whenever possible. His aliens, perhaps most memorably the bear-like Dilbians, are charismatic and sympathetic, if also eccentric.

1959 turned out to be a watershed year for military SF, a subgenre which had precursors but was not really “a thing” as of yet, since it saw the magazine appearances of Dorsai! and, much more (in)famously, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers. Heinlein’s novel won a Hugo while Dickson’s came in second place. Both novels, incidentally, take a philosophically approach to the question of the soldier’s place in society, although it becomes evident that Dickson and Heinlein have very different feelings on the matter. Heinlein had also served in the military (in the navy, to be more specific), but during peacetime, so that he came away with a rose-tinted view of his time in the service. Dickson is considerably less jingoistic, although this is not to say Dorsai! is without its problematic elements. Even so, I’m quite liking what I’ve read so far (about a third of it).

Placing Coordinates

Serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, May to July 1959. It was then printed in book form the following year as The Genetic General, but with a good deal of the original text removed and with a much dumber-sounding title. The magazine version is apparently what got the Hugo nomination. Both the magazine text and title were eventually restored in 1976, and this is now the definitive version of the novel.

Enhancing Image

Dorsai! could be considered a bildungsroman, that being the story of a young man’s education—not his literal in-school education, since actually the novel begins with Donal Graeme graduating from military academy, a fresh-faced eighteen-year-old ready to cross that shadow-line from youth into adulthood. We’ve just started and already Dickson’s novel had skipped over what would become a well-worn trope in science fiction and elsewhere, that being the episode of the protagonist’s life in which they’re schooled on whatever special abilities they’ve either been given or had to learn. Even Starship Troopers has scenes set in the classroom. But Dickson, perhaps wisely, glosses over Donal’s scholastic life at the beginning and instead focuses more on Donal’s personality, or rather how other people understand him. While he is no doubt gifted and highly intelligent, yet both his teachers at the academy and members of his own family doubted him. There’s something “odd” about Donal, yet nobody can put a finger on it.

His courage was unquestioned, his word unblemished. He had headed his class. His very blood and bones were the heritage of a long line of great professional soldiers. No blot of dishonor had ever marred that roll of warriors, no home had ever been burnt, its inhabitants scattered and hiding their family shame under new names, because of some failure on the part of one of the family’s sons. And yet, they doubted.

This is made all the stranger because Donal had quite literally been born and raised to become a soldier. He might go and do something else as an adult, like become a farmer or go into business, enjoy civilian life, but military training was predestined for him and it would always form a part of his character. This is the way of the Dorsai. See, in the 25th century humanity had long since ventured beyond “the Mother Planet” and even our solar system, colonizing planets elsewhere. Humanity has splintered into cultures that specialize in different things, and this specialization is done via a form of eugenics. People, across different cultures with different ends in mind, are selectively bred and nurtured so as to max out certain skill attributes. On Dorsai, people are fine-tuned from even before birth, down to the genetic level, to become the finest soldiers in the known universe. The Dorsai is not someone who will necessarily be the smartest, the wisest, or the most compassionate person, but rather they will be the best-equipped to work as a soldier on other worlds. They will be trained and disciplined specifically in the art of warfare. The Dorsai is a perennial soldier-for-hire, or mercenary, whose job almost by default is to command men from other worlds, with prestige and a paycheck as part of it.

The Dorsai being renowned (if also sometimes contested) abroad makes up for the fact that life on Dorsai itself seems to be rough and impoverished. This is the price the Dorsai pay for what they consider absolute freedom—sort of an anarchist way of life, as free from coercion as humanly possible. (Interestingly, this novel has never even been nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, and the Libertarian Futurist Society seems to have neglected Dickson’s work as a whole. It could be because while the Dorsai way of life is noble, in a way, it’s also shown to not be utopian by any means, even from what little we see of it in the first installment of this one novel.) One would think that a culture based not only in eugenics but the preeminence of the soldier would slip very easily into fascism or at least rub shoulders with it, a la Starship Troopers, but Donal and his family are not warmongers. They hold no animosity towards any of the neighboring human worlds, and they don’t glorify the practice of war. There’s no innate bloodlust. Rather, they place war at the center of their lives because they’re very good at it, like it really is an art form for them.

(As a side note: It’s subtle, but mankind of the future seems to be multi-racial, with Donal himself even being implied to have some mixed ancestry, despite being described in-story and even illustrated as light-skinned. His father’s middle name is Khan, which hails from central Asia, although his first name is Eachan, which is Scotch-Irish.)

The actual plot of the novel, at least at the outset, is somewhat episodic. The first real conflict comes when Donal, barely out of the academy, gets an assignment from a girl not much older than himself named Anea Marlivana, the Select of Kultis, who wants him to destroy a contract written up between her and Prince William of Ceta. There’s an immediate problem, in that not only would it take something special to destroy the contract physically (even a conventional incinerator, we’re told, will not do the trick), but to do so would also mean the death penalty. It practically a suicide mission, and yet Anea herself and her situation are so curious in their contradictions that Donal can’t help but side with her—if only to get closer to William and figure out what this is all about. Donal is trained to command, but he lacks real-world experience, hence my saying this novel could be considered a sort of bildungsroman. There’s an awkwardness and an unusual forwardness about Donal in conversation that implies he might be neurodivergent, but he’s also quite cunning. (I have some more in-depth thoughts to give on this matter, assuming the novel goes where I think it’s going.) He even does what any of us would do in his situation, in the name of getting cozy with higher-ups: that’s right, he lies on his resume, in a sense. This “bare-faced impudence” actually endears him to a major named Hendrik Galt, who happens to be a fellow Dorsai. There will be a few more cases similar to this throughout the installment, in which Donal gets what he wants through rather unconventional means.

Now, putting aside the obvious dubiousness of multiple human civilizations in which a kind of positive eugenics is a social bedrock, there’s also some light misogyny peppered in there. I guess it should not come as a surprise that the only notable female character as of yet is also shown to be easily the most emotionally unstable of the cast. In fairness, there’s a bit of chuckle-worthy (at least to my taste) comic relief with Anea, but this is very much a man’s story about gruff military men. One or two references to “womanly” irrationality in there. Less having to do with whatever may be “problematic” about the novel (truth be told, compared to Starship Troopers it comes off as pretty agreeable), there is also the issue of the ton of exposition that Dickson dumps on the reader regarding the several disparate human cultures and how they interact with each other. It’s a lot to take in for not quite fifty magazine pages, but maybe this will lighten up or at least become easier to digest as the novel progresses. It’s hard to say.

There Be Spoilers Here

Please stay tuned.

A Step Farther Out

Going back to SF of this vintage, one can expect to find things that have aged not so well, but at the same time there’s a chance you’ll find elements in a now-familiar form being subverted before said form has even learned to walk on its own two feet. Dorsai! looks to be a more straightforward example of military SF than Starship Troopers, but this isn’t saying much. Donal’s awkwardness is not what you’d expect from a protagonist in such a novel, despite the larger narrative ensuring us that this young man is destined for great things. There’s very little action. Mostly it’s just people talking, or just as often arguing. There’s a noted lack of patriotism, with the relations between characters being grounded in conflicting beliefs over what would be best for everyone on an international—err, interplanetary scale. I have my own theory about Donal, but let’s wait and see.

See you next time.