Highly principled people

Here we see highly principled journalist Chis Wallace cheerleading for Dick Cheney's torture regime.  What could be worse, you ask?  Someone defending Hitler as a misunderstood champion of peace?  Surely, not even someone as highly principled as Pat Buchanan would claim that.

Childe Cycle: Pefectly Adjusted

"Perfectly Adjusted" is a short story that Sandra Miesel calls the "Satyr Play" of the Childe Cycle.   She refers to the custom among ancient Greek playwrights of accompanying a trilogy of dramatic plays with a burlesque comedy, often featuring satyrs, as an ancient form of comedy relief.  Often the satyr play would be thematically related to the tragedies.  While "Perfectly Adjusted" was originally published in 1955, well before any of the Cycle books, they do seem to share some ideas.  It's a kind of story which was common during the 50s: a traveler, arriving at a planet he's never seen before, finds that the inhabitants act in ways that seem inexplicably odd.  Moreover, their actions interfere with his goals and perhaps even threaten him.  He needs to determine what lies behind their behavior.  Having done so, he can find a solution to his problem, either by discovering an advantageous side of their oddness or by using his new insight to change them.  Sheckley must have written a dozen of these stories, and others came from Kuttner, Silverberg, Vance, and so on.  (Asimov's "Homo Sol" is the reverse case, where an alien finds that humans are strangely unlike the other galactic intelligences.)  These stories range between straightforward problem stories and broad farce.  In general, they subscribe to the clichés in which a planet is less diverse than the real New York City, and spaceships are roughly as sophisticated and damage to them as easily repaired as a used Buick. 

In "Perfectly Adjusted", the hero finds a world with two societies: one a violent and dictatorial police state all of whose members dress in black, and the other a gentler group of psionic adepts who dress in bright colors.  They occupy the same city, yet neither seems aware of the other; for each, seeing people of the other sort is a pernicious (if common) hallucination.  (Note that this idea isn't original with Dickson; it goes back at least to "Ulan Dhor Ends a Dream", one of Vance's early Dying Earth stories.)  The hero alternates between almost being killed by the dictator and being mentally controlled by the chief adept.   In his spare time, he tries to help a pretty adept he's befriended.  She has been excommunicated for her persistent hallucinations and is only slowly persuaded that the hero isn't a hallucination too.  Having figured out that each society has a mental block against seeing dressed people in the other's color, the hero invents a machine that will disintegrate all the clothing in the city.   The result is that everyone can now see everyone else, half of whom they'd never heard of before (and all of them naked); escaping in the confusion, the (also naked) hero makes it back to his ship.  He and the pretty girl take off, fighting over the single spare suit of his clothing they've got left. 

I trust it's clear from the description that this story is about as broad as farce gets.  Still, it has some points of interest.  The two societies were originally different factions in the city; each assumes that it had conquered the other, which proceeded to die out.  The police state, which also runs a murderous space station that almost shot up the hero as he first approached the planet, exhibits the worst features of the military.  The adepts, convinced that their only accomplishment, their psi powers, make them homo superior, are like idiot savant parodies of the Exotics.  Both share a fanatical faith in their own virtue and the inferiority (technically, nonexistence) of any competing culture.  And what's necessary to end this division of humanity is a man who can see both sides and help them blend back together.  Given when this story was written, it's probably foolish to make too much of the similarities between it and the Cycle, but they are amusing. 

Childe Cycle: Other and Antagonist

Other (1994), a direct sequel to Young Bleys, is the story of Bleys's conquest of New Earth, Cassida, and Newton.  The three planets have tightly coupled economies: the pure scientists live on Newton, and Cassida has the engineers that turn Newton's discoveries into products, which New Earth manufactures and sells.  Other is essentially the story of Bleys finding the right pressure points to bring all three worlds under his control.  I don't see much value in describing how he does this in detail. 

Henry MacLean's elder son is grown and married, and his younger son has been sent off-world to fight and been killed.  His responsibility is now, he feels, to Bleys, whom he sees as having been seduced by Satan.  A former mercenary himself, Henry volunteers to lead Bleys's bodyguards, as a way of staying near Bleys and if possible turning him away from evil, even though this endangers Henry's own soul; he gave up fighting long ago because he enjoyed the violence too much.  Henry loves Bleys, and is completely unselfish in his desire to help him.  Along with Jamethon Black, Henry represents the Friendlies at their finest.  (Both are military men, for what that's worth.) 

Dahno, more and more, realizes that Bleys is leading the Others, and he's merely along for the ride.  He will object to a scheme of Bleys's if it seems unlikely to work, or won't produce immediate practical results, but Bleys  either reassures Dahno or simply overrides him.  Since Bleys's past schemes have all worked, Dahno gets no support in his objections.  We can sense that eventually there will be a showdown between the two, but it doesn't occur in this book. 

Towards the end of the book, after these three worlds fall to the Others, Bleys announces that his next conquest will be Ste. Marie.  When he was very young, still living with his mother, and very alone, he'd read about the assassination of Kensie Graeme, and felt that in his isolation he was like the bereaved Ian Graeme.  He wants to bring Ste. Marie under the rule of the Others, because with no rebels there will be no political violence; he imagines, conscious of his sentimentally, that this will help Ian rest more peacefully.  That Bleys could believe that a government powerful enough to suppress its enemies would please any Dorsai, especially Ian, makes it clear how little be really understands people; he sees himself as their benevolent parent, making sure they won't so anything silly and hurt themselves. 

At the very end of Other, Bleys learns that Hal Mayne has escaped from his prison cell on Harmony, which helps place this book with respect to The Final Encyclopedia, in which Hal is about to travel to the Exotic worlds for the first time.   Bleys says in so many words something that's been implied throughout: Hal is the only person in the universe Bleys considers an equal, and he wishes they could have been friends. 

Antagonist (2007) was completed by Dickson's long-time assistant, David W. Wixon.  (To the best of my knowledge, it's a coincidence that they rhyme.)  This is a "posthumous collaboration", as Gordon Dickson passed away in 2001.  David Wixon had been Dickson's assistant for many years.  In fact, my copy of Lost Dorsai, published in 1993, contains a section written by Wixon called "A Childe Cycle Concordance", full of information about the Cycle's setting and characters.  I've referred to it extensively in writing these reviews.  Unfortunately, Antagonist was published without a foreword, an afterward, or notes of any kind, so there's no way to tell how much of it is Dickson and how much Wixon.

Antagonist is the only book in the Cycle that's told out of order.  It  begins with Bleys and his usual entourage (Dahno, Antonia Lu, and Henry MacLean, as Drama, Shauna, and E respectively) on Ceta, which is not yet controlled by the Others, and which is in the midst of a civil war.   While traveling in an armed column between cities, Bleys is ambushed, his vehicle disabled, and his group forced to fight for their lives.  The next chapter goes back to Bleys's decision to visit Ceta.  Eventually the story gets back to the battle, which all the major characters survive.  Antagonist is a lot like Other.  It consists largely of political intrigue, in this case about the Other takeover of Ceta.   While on Ceta, Bleys concludes that there's an underground group that's been trying to sabotage the Dorsai and Exotics for many years, and have infiltrated the Others there.  Once uncovered, they explain that they're admirers of the long-dead William of Ceta, whom they think would have united the universe under Cetan rule had Donal and his Exotic supporters not defeated William, and they still resent that.  Given Bleys's plan for destroying both Exotic and Dorsai cultures, it's easy enough to make them his allies, and the Others' conquest of Ceta is assured. 

Dahno, resentful of the way Bleys has effectively taken over the Others, decides to strike out on his own.  He assures Bleys that they're not enemies; he simply wants to be in charge of his own enterprises.  For this purpose, Dahno moves to Earth, to set up the sort of consulting and lobbying organization the Others had been.  Bleys eventually discovers that Dahno has been plotting against him, and he kidnaps Dahno, stranding him on a remote, uninhabited island on the Dorsai with enough food and supplies to last the rest of his life.  To guard against the remote possibility that someone will run across Dahno and Dahno will be able to use his vast powers of persuasion to make him an ally, Bleys renders Dahno mute. 

Back on shipboard, in a scene reminiscent of the beginning of The Final Encyclopedia, Bleys's soldiers take some prisoners but fail to secure them properly.  In the ensuing melee, Henry is mortally wounded, ending once and for all the possibility of his finding a way to save Bleys's soul.  Bleys now travels to the Encyclopedia to speak to Hal Mayne, and the book ends as we see once again the conversation they had at the end of The Final Encyclopedia.

Dickson has set himself a difficult task with the three Bleys books.  They're the story of someone who's isolated, humorless, full of himself, self-pitying, and almost completely unsympathetic.  Moreover, he's static.  None of his accomplishments and none of the people who come to love and admire him really change him;  he remains his mother's emotional victim throughout.  This makes thematic sense: he projects his insecurity on the entire human race, and wants to return it back to the womb represented by the Earth.  But it would be hard enough to make the reader care enough about such a character to keep him interested through one book, let alone three.  I felt that I understood Bleys quite well enough after Young Bleys, and the next two books were simple a collection of incidents, as unnecessary as the rescue sequence in The Chantry Guild. 

There are some inconsistencies between the Hal Mayne sequence and the Bleys Ahrens sequence.  

Hal books(The Final Encyclopedia, The Chantry Guild)	Bleys books(Young Bleys, Other, Antagonist)
At the time of the attack on Hal's home, the Others control almost all of the human worlds.	The Others control only the Friendly worlds at that point.
Bleys's mother was a Friendly, and his father a Dorsai/Exotic crossbreed.	Bleys's mother smelled of elderberries is an Exotic and we never learn anything about his father.
The Others try to keep hidden that their power to persuade comes from their Friendly background.	Bleys first becomes a public figure as a member of the Friendly parliament, and it's well-known that he grew up on Association.

There is a revised version of The Final Encyclopedia that was published in 1997.  I've never seen it, and I don't know whether it addresses these issues.

Quick Take on the Pen and the Sword

Obama Administration:

There's a big controversy over whether carrying loaded guns should be allowed at town-hall meetings  The conclusion: Yes, that's a constitutional right.

Bush Administration:

There's a minor controversy over whether anti-war T-shirts should be allowed at town-hall meetings.  The conclusion: Book 'em, Dan-o.

Childe Cycle: Young Bleys

Young Bleys (1991) begins the story of Bleys Ahrens,  the nine-year-old child of an Exotic woman who's a sort of courtesan, moving from lover to lover.  She doesn't love Bleys or anyone else, really, but enjoys the attention her prodigy of a son gains her.  Bleys, who can't bear living with his mother any more, insults her in a way she can't forgive, even though he know that she's quite capable of killing or seriously injuring him in response.  (After her current lover has told her she's beautiful, Bleys says quite coldly and, what's worse, truthfully "You're not, and we both know that.")  Restraining her temper, she sends Bleys away to live with Henry MacLean, a farmer on Association and the brother of a former lover with whom she's remained friendly.  It's the same place she had previously sent her elder child, Bleys's half-brother Dahno.  (We never do learn who either Bleys's or Dahno's fathers are.) This is the last we ever see of Bleys's mother; she's never even given a name.

Henry is a widower with two sons (Dahno, a grown man, no longer lives there.)  He's very religious in a fundamentalist way, as are both of his boys.  He clearly loves both of them very much, though he's very strict with them as his way of raising them to be good and Godly men. They are not wealthy; all of them work hard on the farm, and they have no luxuries of any sort. Henry is building some farm machinery out of whatever parts he can accumulate, but most of their work is done by hand.  Life with the MacLeans could not be more different than Bleys's life with his mother.  Henry is equally stern with Bleys, who works with the rest of them. Henry's sons accept Bleys, especially the younger boy, of whom Bleys starts to grow fond.  The only gulf between Bleys and his adopted family is their faith; he has none, and even though Bleys would like to attend church with the rest of them, Henry won't allow insincere prayer.  Bleys, wanting to fit in with his new family, tries to discover faith within him, but it is not to be: somehow, the community finds out about his mother, and attacks him (both verbally and physically) as a "whore's son".  It's not possible for his to live there anymore, and he's sent away again, this time to live with Dahno

Dahno is a giant of a man: tall, broad, heavily muscled, with a booming voice.  He also has an outsized personality, unlike the introverted Bleys.  Dahno has turned the Others, originally a social club for Splinter Culture crossbreeds, into a successful business.  Teaching its talented members to dig out politically valuable information, Dahno has become the most successful political consultant and lobbyist in the Friendly worlds, and he's beginning to organize the off-world Others as well.  For this he'll need underlings he can trust, and it's soon clear that it was Dahno who leaked the information about their mother.   He makes it clear to Bleys who the boss is and what the price of disloyalty would be by slapping him around some.  Dahno is his mother's son.

Bleys learns the Others' business quickly, and is full of ways to improve it.  Bleys, who like many of the Cycle's main characters, grows to be extremely tall, builds himself up via exercise, masters martial arts, and works to overcome his introversion and becomes a spellbinding speaker.  In addition, he becomes active in Friendly politics, cultivating the Eldest (the leader of both worlds), and becoming his chief assistant.  Dahno feels the need to remind Bleys repeatedly who's in charge: Dahno is the chairman, and Bleys merely the vice-chairman, but more and more Bleys is the real leader.  Dahno's goals stop at wealth and power, which Bleys is helping him achieve, but Bleys's go much further.  He fears that humanity has expanded into the universe too fast and may have fatally overextended itself.  He wants to lead all of humanity back to Earth where it will be safe again, letting the Younger Worlds eventually die of neglect.  Bleys sees the Others' growing political power as a lever with which to accomplish this.

While looking for a martial arts instructor, Bleys meets Antonia Lu, a beautiful Eurasian teacher.  They're instantly drawn together, and she gives up her other work to become his full-time instructor and lover.  Their relationship is very different from Hal and Amanda's: where Amanda is independent, Antonia is subservient, accepting that if Bleys doesn't really love her or have time for her, it's because his goals for humanity take up too much of him, and that being there when he needs her is all the purpose she requires.  Bleys and Dahno now travel to Earth to meet with the Others there.  They decide that renting a meeting place will attract too much attention; instead, they'll swoop down and occupy a large estate for a few days, and then disappear.

(This has always seemed to me like Monty Python logic:

We could rent a hotel ballroom.

No, that'll attract too much attention.  We need something stealthier.  How about a home invasion?

)

To some extent Dickson showed the same events from two points of view before in pairs of earlier stories:

• Tam Olyn and Donal Graeme attending the same party in Solder, Ask Not and Dorsai! 
• "Amanda Morgan" expanding on the siege of the Dorsai world first shown in Tactics of Mistake
• "Brothers" showing Kensie's murder and its aftermath, seen from a distance in Soldier, Ask Not and Dorsai!

There's far more of this double vision between the Hal Mayne books (The Final Encyclopedia and Chantry Guild) and the Bleys Ahrens books (this one, Other, and the posthumous Antagonist.)   Here is the first example: Bleys, fascinated by the story of Hal Mayne, found alone in a spaceship and raised by his three Splinter Culture tutors, chooses to hold the meeting at his home, with tragic results.  For Hal, it's one of the major, if tragic, events in his life: his tutors give their lives to save his; as a result he owes them a debt he spends the rest of his life repaying.  For Bleys, with his usual lack of empathy, it's merely an unfortunate situation caused by incompetent henchmen.

The many names of Margaret Dumont

Film	La Dumont
Coconuts	Mrs. Potter
Animal Crackers	Mrs. Rittenhouse
Duck Soup	Mrs. Teasdale
A Night at the Opera	Mrs. Claypool
A Day at the Races	Mrs. Upjohn
At the Circus	Mrs. Dukesbury
The Big Store	Mrs. Phelps

Childe Cycle: The Chantry Guild

The title of The Chantry Guild (1988) fooled people. Sandra Miesel, in her afterward to The Final Encyclopedia, assumed it would be a sequel to Necromancer, and I, before purchasing it from the SFBC when it first came out, assumed the same. In fact, it's a direct sequel to The Final Encyclopedia (the first direct sequel in the Cycle, though not the last).

It begins with Amanda Morgan living on Kultis (one of the Exotic worlds), which is now occupied by the Others. Since the Exotics no longer had the Dorsai to do their fighting for them, they were easily defeated by the Others, and are now overseen by a garrison force of third-rate troops. Amanda acts as a sort of one-woman guerrilla force that rescues prisoners and in other ways make the occupation more bearable, to remind the Exotics that the Dorsai are still with them in spirit.

Hal Mayne is still at the Encyclopedia, searching for a way to access the Creative Universe, the place where all possible things live as Platonic ideals. Dickson implies that all human creation comes from there, and that creativity in humans comes from the ability of the unconscious mind to access it. It's what Donal used to become first Paul Formain and then Hal, and it's also where Walter Blunt found the powers he called the Alternate Laws. What Hal is searching for is a way to use it consciously as a weapon to defeat the Others. As the story begins, he's been searching for over a year with no success, and is close to giving up. The worst of this is that Tam Olyn, who's well over a hundred years old, is barely hanging on to life, and is desperate for Hal to make some breakthrough before he dies, much as Mark Torre was desperate to find a successor before he died.

Amanda comes to the Encyclopedia with news for Hal. A group of Exotics on Kultis has resurrected the old Chantry Guild. They live on a mountain, hidden from the occupation forces, and they spend their day marching in a circle, chanting the mantra The transient and the eternal are the same Amanda suggests that joining them could lead to new insights. Hal agrees, and they travel there. On his first turn in the circle, Hal has a vision of John Hawkwood, the 14th-century mercenary, spiritual ancestor of the Dorsai. (Had Dickson written the historical novels which were to begin the Childe Cycle, one would have been about Hawkwood.) On a later one, he has a vision of his great-great-grandfather Cletus, and realizes that Cletus (who had been a painter before turning to the military) used the Creative Universe to help him write his books on strategy and tactics

Next comes a long section in which Hal leads a group of Exotics to rescue a young girl, the niece of one of the Chantry Guild members. The murder of her parents has driven her mad, and she's become feral, living in the woods below their mountain. The Guild learns that she's been captured by the occupying army. Even though Exotics, having no military training, make fairly useless recruits, Hal is successful in the rescue. On the way back, he has an insight about the Creative Universe: not how to access it just yet, but that he's now ready to address the problem.

Once they're back, the Guild has an unexpected visitor: Bleys Ahrens. Bleys wants to discuss a truce with Hal. He begins with some vague threats about what the sacking of Earth would be like, and then makes his offer: drop Earth's shield and accept some immigrants from the Younger Worlds, and Bleys will call off the invasion. Hal sees through it quickly enough: these immigrants would be a fifth column, to divide Earth and weaken its resolve. Also, this would be a first step towards depopulating all of the Younger Worlds and leaving only an Earth no longer interested in space travel. Hal refuses the offer and returns to the Encyclopedia.

Once there, he orders a device built which will propel him into the Creative Universe, and it works: once there, he meets many people from his past: Hal's tutors, Donal's parents, his uncles James and Kensie, and his brother Mor, who forgives him. Hal sees his goal as a dark tower (in fact, the tower of the poem "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came"). He realizes that the Others are his creation: without Paul Formain's encouragement for the different facets of humanity to split off and form their own societies, the piece of humanity that feared growth would never have manifested itself as the Others. Hal also realizes that reaching the tower by himself is useless; he needs at least one companion for the Creative Universe to be part of humanity's shared reality rather than his own private dream. He brings the dying Tam, who sees his own dead: Kensie, Jamethon, and his brother-in-law Dave, all of whom greet Tam happily. (The men whose death Tam was responsible for form another three.) Hal leaves then, and goes back to the real world, where Tam, reconciled at last, peacefully passes away.

This is another long book; not the size of The Final Encyclopedia, but still twice the length of the earlier novels, and as the above summary shows, not all that much happens. Fully a third of it is the rescue sequence, which, while containing most of the book's action, seems disconnected and somewhat irrelevant. The parts of the book that are thematically important, Hal's quest to reach the Creative Universe, are largely expressed through visions and symbols: in that sense, The Chantry Guild is similar to Necromancer

Walter Blunt's place in the Cycle is complex. On the one hand, his call to pure destruction is wrong; Paul Formain was right to amend it to a call for creation in different directions. And the worship of destruction is what warped Tam Olyn's uncle and almost ruined Tam himself. On the other hand, Blunt was right that the technological nightmare Earth had become needed to end; his Chantry Guild became the Exotics, who became the champions of human advancement; and the Chantry Guild of this book originated in the assumption that Blunt had insights that the Exotics had lost. Last, Blunt's Alternate Laws form the basis for Hal Mayne's idea of the Creative Universe. Blunt was in some ways a Moses who, for his sins, was never granted the Promised Land. Or to say it another way, he was Thomas Paine: the right man to help start the revolution, but not someone you'd want to help organize the result.

At this point, with Hal in possession of what he needs to defeat Bleys Ahrens, the conclusion of the Cycle is in sight. We even know what that book would have been called: Childe. For whatever reason, Dickson didn't write it. Instead, he decided to tell us the story of the rise of Others from the point of view of their leader, in the books Young Bleys, Other, and finally the posthumous Antagonist