(The Rest is) History

This wasn't a war. Not officially. Not even among the two native races. Tigeries and Seatrolls had fought since they evolved to intelligence, probably. But that was like men and wolves in ancient days, nothing systematic, plan natural enemies. Until the Merseians began giving the Seatrolls equipment and advice and the landfolk were driven back. When Terra heard about that, it was sheer reflex to do likewise for the Tigeries, preserve the balance lest Starkad be unified as a Merseian puppet. As a result, the Merseians upped their help a bit, and Terrans replied in kind, and--and the two empires remained at peace.

Poul Anderson, "Ensign Flandry"

SINCE IT'S CHRISTMAS, after all, I'm rereading a novel by a fellow named Poul Anderson called "Ensign Flandry." It's a rip-roaring tale of interstellar espionage, big-breasted tiger aliens, and empire--but, like so many other sci-fi rags written in 1966, it's awfully dated by its failure to imagine any future not characterized by perpetual bipolar war. (For a slightly subtler example of Cold War sf, check out "The Forever War" or anything by that other dude I like.)

The story's intrigue unfolds on Starkad, a primitive backwater planet in Betelgeuse sector which nobody wants, and the satellite war that the two great powers, Terra and Merseia, foment between the natives there. (The Terrans support the tiger people; the Merseians, the fish people. My browser's spell-check extension seems to already recognize the word "Merseian". That's weird.) Naturally neither the Terrans nor the Merseians really want war on Starkad, but neither one dares concede any ground for fear of losing the confidence, therefore support, of Betelgeuse itself. In the end it turns out the evil Merseian empire was actually trying to trick the Terrans into concentrating as much of their fleet around Starkad as possible, having discovered the planet lay in the path of a huge asteroid, but the eponymous ensign figures it all out in the nick of time and they all go home. Nice.

Anderson was born in 1926, which means he passed his formative years not in the Cold War but in the Hot one: a patently multipolar universe of the sort that strikes me as just more likely in a huge galaxy teeming with intelligent spacefaring life. So his motivation for bipolarity for this novel is probably allegorical or aesthetic and not necessarily the product of his upbringing or context. He could have imagined, grew up imagining, a different kind of world and war but chose not to. Fine.

But it's been making me think. Joe Haldeman, the author of "The Forever War," was born in 1943, and he was drafted as an engineer to Vietnam in '67. Admittedly, his novel, written in '76, is much less about bipolarity and much more about the psychological effects of war at relativistic speeds. But it could have been just like "Flandry," and since I always remember it that way, bear with me...

For obvious reasons, it's hard to recognize our own blind spots--hard as individuals, harder still as generations, nigh impossible as a civilization. What makes sense to me can be incomprehensible to you (or, more often, vice versa; don't fret); the way we see the world might be incommunicably different from the way a Renaissance man did or an Indian man does; and complete modes of social organization wholly unlike ours are simply unimaginable. And so if Poul Anderson's novels bear the mark of the Cold War, perhaps it's because he wrote in a context that made it hard to imagine any other kind of politics. It makes me wonder--what kinds of blind spots are we constrained by? What are our failures of imagination? In 42 years, which assumptions will make our science fiction look silly?