Childe Cycle: Necromancer

In Necromancer (1962) we travel back to a time when interstellar flight is still under development. All humans live on Earth, which is run by a giant computer network called the World Complex. The world is a lot like ours, only more complicated and mechanized, and some people are starting to reject that complication, hoping to find something else they feel more attuned to. Among these groups in the Chantry Guild, run by Walter Blunt. He's a mystic of sorts, who claims to have discovered and mastered the Alternate Laws, a source of psychic powers. His goal is to destroy technological civilization to build a new world based on the Alternate Laws.

Enter Paul Formain, a mining engineer. A few years ago, he almost died after being lost at sea in a small boat. In fact, he hallucinated that he'd died and been brought back to life by a robed magician. Now, on his first day at a new mining job, he spends an idle moment watching a news broadcast about the Chantry Guild. Something about them fascinates him, and distracts him enough to cause a careless, almost-fatal accident. He survives, but loses his left arm. As compensation, his right arm grows into a massive force, like the arm of a much bigger, more powerful man. (As another character mentions, "Formain" is very close to the French for "strong hand".) His body has rejected all attempts to graft a new left arm, for no reason medical science can explain. But Paul learns that one use of The Alternate Laws is to regenerate limbs.

Paul contacts the Chantry Guild, and is taken on as a probationer. He meets Jason Warren, the Guild's second-in-command, and a beautiful young woman and talented singer named Kantele Maki, Blunt's lover. She is both attracted to and repulsed by Paul. As a first test, Paul is assigned the task of delivering cocaine to one of the Guild's clients. It goes badly, and Paul, Jason, and Kantele have to teleport themselves away using the Alternate Laws. Paul teleports, but apparently via a different mechanism, the first clue that he has some direct connection with the Alternate Laws himself.

Paul now travels to Mercury to begin his Guild training. Having passed that, he becomes a full member and necromancer in the Guild, and also takes a job working in the World Complex. Its head, Kirk Tyne, is actually a friend of Walter Blunt's, and considers him a remarkable man with a bee in his bonnet about the Complex, so he's willing to take on Paul on Blunt's recommendation. The Complex, recognizing Paul as a threat to it, uses the new technology of the "phase shift" (a hyperspace-like space drive) to transport him in a drone spacecraft to New Earth, a planet orbiting Sirius (which later becomes one of the first inhabited Younger Worlds.) He find his own way back (again, using the Alternate Laws), and discovers that Blunt had been behind everything that has happened to him, including being revivified after the boating accident. While he'd been gone, the revolt against the World Complex had begun in earnest. Paul returns to find Blunt and Tyne talking, with Blunt gloating that he'd won, and pointing to Paul as the final piece of his victory: immortality through the ability to move to a newer, younger body.

But that wasn't quite right. Paul wasn't really another Walter Blunt; he was really animated by someone else. Who? Well, we're given some clues:

• He's traveled into the past to change the future
• He knew what changes needed to be made because he has conscious control over his intuition
• "Once, I was a professional soldier"

The size and strength of Paul's right arm is another clue. Donal was always self-conscious about being small for a Dorsai, and wished he were as big and powerful as the rest of the Graemes. The arm is a first step towards that; as we'll see, later on he goes further. Rather than impose Blunt's dream of destruction on the world, Paul/Donal encourages those present to seek out others like themselves, assuring them that soon space travel would allow them to go and pursue their own dreams: Jason, as new leader of the Guild will clearly found the Exotics, Burt McCleod, who's been Blunt's bodyguard, the Dorsai, and one of Tyne's underlings who's a religious fanatic, the Friendlies. Blunt leaves, a broken man, and Kantele, at least for the moment, stays with Paul.

Necromancer is the least realistic of all the Childe Cycle books. The plot is almost Van Vogtian in its complications and conspiracies, and much of the action consists of people performing impossibilities using psychic powers. It's also the most disconnected from the rest of the series. The only direct connection is that later books refer to Paul Formain and Walter Blunt as obscure historical figures. And it has what seems to me to be a glaring plot hole. Donal goes back in time to change the future. Had he not gone back, Paul Formain would have been Blunt's creature, and wouldn't have defied Blunt by encouraging the creation of the Splinter Cultures. Yet Donal came from the world of the Splinter Cultures, not the world where Blunt and the Chantry Guild had conquered the earth. There's some hand-waving in Chantry Guild about how Paul Formain's actions didn't change what happened, but only how people viewed what happened, and that resulted in changes to Donal's future, not Donal's present. That's not what Necromancer shows us.

There are some interesting parallels between Dorsai! and Necromancer. Donal and Paul travel similar paths: they begin in obscurity, and achieve positions of considerable power. Donal uses his power to try to make the human world run the way he'd like it to; Paul has learned that doesn't work, and instead leads people to make their own choices. Also, Donal and Paul both attract remarkable women, but don't know quite what to do about it.

Childe Cycle: Dorsai!

Dorsai! (1959) is the very first of the Childe Cycle novels. It tells the story of Donal Graeme. The Graemes are the first family of the Dorsai (we'll meet his ancestor Cletus, the founder of the family, in Tactics of Mistake), but Donal's mother is an Exotic from Mara. (There's a famous typo in which a chapter title that should say "Part Maran" reads "Part Moron"). The result is a boy that is, as the first sentence of the book tells us, odd. He's a good-sized man, but not big for a Dorsai, and small for a Graeme. He has a Dorsai's strength of character, and the Dorsai tendency towards cold, murderous rage, but on the surface there's nothing remarkable about him. On the surface, that is...

The plan of the book is quite simple. Donal begins as a junior office, and ends up as Protector of the Worlds, an office that's invented for him, and which amounts to Overlord of Humanity. Each chapter describes a stage in Donal's ascent. He is always the viewpoint character, but we're rarely given access to his deeper thoughts or feelings. He's clearly always thinking several steps ahead, but we infer that rather than being shown it. We also notice that Donal knows things he doesn't really have enough information to have figured out and is sure of himself in situations that seem to us to be amorphous. Indeed, there's something odd about him. A bit of background before we examine the plot. Commerce between worlds largely consists of exporting and importing the contracts of specialized talent: soldiers from the Dorsai, psychologists and healers from the Exotic planets, technologists from Cassida and Newton, etc. There are two main blocs: those whose inhabitants control their own contracts, like the Dorsai and the Exotics, and those whose contracts are owned by their planetary governments: like the Friendlies and Ceta. There's a natural rivalry between the two. (If you want to see this as an analogue of the West vs. Communism, feel free.) The Exotics see the spread of tight-contract policies as dangerous to themselves and to the human race, and do what they can to resist it.

The book begins with Donal traveling to his first assignment on a commercial spaceship, where he meets two people who turn out to be quite important. Prince William of Ceta appears to be a successful business tycoon. Anea is a young and beautiful Exotic woman who's the Select of Kultis, that is, considered to be the best result of that planet's genetic and psychological sciences. She has been contracted to work for William, though she's clearly uncomfortable around him. In fact, she asks Donal to help her escape from William, something that's quite impossible: he's too powerful a man for the Exotics to dare to insult in that fashion. From the fact that the Select of Kultis is acting in a way that's frankly stupid and a few other clues, Donal divines that William, behind his pleasant exterior, is a genuinely evil bastard. He also starts to grasp William's true goal, which is to gain control of the interstellar market in contracts, and thus effectively control all of the human worlds.

Donal begins his campaign against William by succeeding brilliantly in his first assignment and gaining a promotion. Much of the book follows his career as he moves from one job to another, always moving up the ladder and gaining more renown. He meets Anea a few times along the way, and each time she seems both attracted to him and repulsed by him. (This won't be the last time we see this pattern.) Donal also gains a retinue of sorts: other Dorsai who have been damaged in some fashion and seem to take comfort in Donal's strength. (Two of them are Donal's uncle Ian Graeme and Corunna el Man; we'll meet them again in later stories.) Eventually, Donal forces William into open combat and defeats him. William, having anticipated his ruin, has taken his revenge: he'd previously hired Donal's brother Mor as a military advisor, and when Donal comes to capture him, he shows Donal Mor's tortured, mutilated corpse. Donal, in the full throes of rage and horror, orders William to suffer, and then escapes into a sort of catatonia.

Afterward, when the care of the Exotics has started to heal Donal, he forgives William and tells him to atone by using his talents for good. A few things are made clear:

• Anea was intended by the Exotics to fall in love with William, the strongest man around her, and be a good influence on him. They didn't expect that someone stronger would emerge, and Anea would love him instead. In fact, Anea is now very happily enamored of Donal.
• Donal's oddness is his ability to use intuition. Given a few facts, he can build a pattern, cross-check it against other facts, and be as certain of his conclusions as a normal man is of a logical certainty.
• No other human has this ability, or can even comprehend it. When Donal tries to explain it to one of the chief Exotic philosophers, the man assumes Donal is using the Socratic method to demonstrate that no such talent is possible.

So even as the effective ruler of all human worlds, with a brilliant, beautiful woman who loves him, Donal is still alone.

Childe Cycle: Overview

Gordon Dickson's Childe Cycle was published over a period of 48 years, and includes nine novels and four shorter works. Originally, it was planned to include three historical novels, three contemporary novels, and six SF novels. (More of the last because Dickson didn't think there would be a market for SF novels as long as the others. If you're old enough, you might recall when an SF novel would fill only about 200 pages of a paperback.) The idea was to trace two main forces through human history and into the future: one that pushed for new challenges, and one that wanted to conserve the advances already made. Dickson's sympathies were with the former, and his usual method was to make the hero of each book embody expansion (usually called "creation") while the villain stands for stasis (often called "destruction').

The setting of almost all of the Cycle is the sixteen inhabited worlds of the galaxy. (Sometimes there are only fourteen. Dickson would often revise his plan, and small inconsistencies crop up with some frequency. But the final scheme included sixteen.) Except for Earth, almost all are monocultures, by design. The grand scheme is that mankind used space travel to try out many different approaches to dealing with the vastness of the universe, and people with similar ideas emigrated together. The result is the Splinter Cultures, of which the most notable are:

1. The Dorsai, the name of both the people and their planet. They're a race of warriors, born and bred to be soldiers. They combine the military virtues of bravery, determination, and loyalty with an extraordinary athleticism. We never meet any evil Dorsai; they're pretty much all decent people, and many of them are heroic. So many of the stories feature them that the Childe Cycle is often called the Dorsai Saga. The Dorsai is a fairly poor planet; they survive mostly by hiring themselves out as high-priced mercenaries.
2. The Exotics. They are a race of philosophers living on the two planets Mara and Kultis. (There's a famous typo in one of the books where a chapter about a character who's half-Maran is titled "Half-Moron"). The Exotics have developed psychology to the point where it's almost magic; they can do things like predict that a particular person will be at a particular place at a particular time, because the "ontological forces" insist on it. This sort of insight enables them to do very well in trade. They're also philosophical pacifists, so it's a good thing they can afford to hire the Dorsai to fight their battles. The Exotics' most important interest is human evolution. They understand a lot about the Splinter Cultures, and are constantly trying to discover what comes next.
3. The Friendlies. They are religious fundamentalists living on the planets Harmony and Association. These feature many different Churches with differing beliefs, so there are constant low-level disagreements and battles on these worlds, though it rarely rises to the level of actual warfare. All the ones we see include strict discipline, simple ways of life, and a devotion to prayer and their church that makes them seem almost Amish. Like the Dorsai, the Friendly worlds are poor, and they also hire themselves as mercenaries, but where the Dorsai are elite troops, the Friendlies are cannon fodder. The Friendlies are the least sympathetic of the three, though Dickson goes to some effort to show the honor of their devotion to their faith.

There are other cultures (technologists on Newton and Cassida, planet-wide mines on Coby, capitalists on Ceta, etc.), but the term "Splinter Cultures" usually means just those three. (Threes come up a lot in the Cycle, just as they do in Celtic mythology; I'll try to note them when they do.)

There are four main time periods shown.

1. Earth just before space travel:

Necromancer (AKA No Room for Man)


2. The early days of space travel, with the Younger Worlds newly settled:

Tactics of Mistake, "Amanda Morgan"

3. The height of the Splinter Cultures:

Dorsai!, Soldier, Ask Not, "Warrior", "Lost Dorsai", "Brothers"

4. The decay of the Splinter Cultures

This is told from two points of view.

The creative Hal Mayne: The Final Encyclopedia, Chantry Guild

The static Bleys Ahrens: Young Bleys, Other, Antagonist

The Cycle is unfinished. The Hal Mayne books and Bleys Ahrens books end at almost the same point, just before the final battle between the two historical forces is about to be fought. Dickson had named the book in which it occurs (Childe) and discussed it often, but apparently never wrote any of it. This makes the whole thing a bit frustrating: there's a lot here to read, much of which is clearly leading up to the final stage of the conflict, yet we don't get the closure of seeing it resolved.

If Raymond Chandler had written Lord of the Rings

The sun came up over the ridge like a fried egg on top of a burnt slice of toast. Then the trumpets sounded. Lots of them, as if Sauron had paid for a lifetime supply and wanted to get his money's worth if the world ended today. The night shift went back to the holes they had crawled out of the night before, and the day shift started to straggle in, lugging their swords, as if they didn't know which they hated more, Sauron or themselves. I didn't know any of this crew, but cops are cops, even in Bay CityMordor.

"Well, here we are!" said Sam. He liked to tell you things you already knew. I didn't mind, most of the time, but here in front of the Black Gate of Mordor, I could think of one or two or a hundred more useful topics of conversation. He talked about his father a lot too, and his garden, and he seemed to think that if he ever got back to them, everything would be like it was. I kept quiet about that. It wasn't my job to tell him that seeing the wide world changes your shape so that you don't fit in the places you used to. He was a little guy, but I liked him.

Gates-gate

After a spot of the deep thinking which will characterize these pages, I have determined that what this country truly needs is

1. Yet another blog
2. Yet another discussion of the run-in between the professor and the cop.

Re point 2: The facts remain in dispute, and are likely to remain so indefinitely. (Even if the White House beer bash results in the warring parties making nice, this results at most in a third set of facts, which while mutually agreed on will not necessarily be accurate.) If in lieu of the truth we apply Occam's razor, the following results:

• Cops who feel they have been abused will find a way to get a bit of their own back. Disrupting the perp's day by placing him under arrest is a popular one. That charges were quickly dropped does not invalidate this as a tactic; it still cost Professor Gates significant amounts of time and perhaps money.
• This tactic can be and in fact is used on victims of all races, colors, and creeds. Think how often you've read that demonstrators have been arrested en masse and were later released without being charged. That's pretty much the same thing. It does not constitute evidence of racism, prima facie or otherwise.
• It is, however an abuse of police power: as president Obama quite sensibly commented, there is no excuse for arresting someone in his own home when it's clear no crime has been committed.
• Anyone who dwells on Gates's alleged misbehavior or how dangerous police work is and how we owe them respect may be correct, but if they go on to justify the arrest, they show no understanding of the point made above. They are happy to live in a police state (presumably, only so long as it's people they disapprove of being its victims.)