- Pournelle, Jerry.
Fires of Freedom.
Riverdale, NY: Baen Publishing, [1976, 1980] 2010.
ISBN 978-1-4391-3374-3.
-
This book includes two classic Jerry Pournelle novels which have
been long out of print. Baen Publishing is doing journeyman work
bringing the back lists of science fiction masters such as Pournelle,
Robert Heinlein, and Poul Anderson back to the bookshelves, and this is a much
welcome addition to the list. The two novels collected here are
unrelated to one another. The first,
Birth of Fire,
originally published in 1976, follows a gang member who accepts
voluntary exile to Mars to avoid a prison sentence on Earth. Arriving
on Mars, he discovers a raw frontier society dominated by large
Earth corporations who exploit the largely convict labour force.
Nobody has to work, but if you don't work, you don't get paid
and can't recharge the air medal everybody wears around their neck.
If it turns red, or you're caught in public not wearing one,
good tax-paying citizens will put the freeloader
“outside”—without a pressure suit.
Former gangster Garrett Pittston finds that Mars suits him just fine,
and, avoiding the temptations of the big companies, signs on as a
farmhand with a crusty Marsman who goes by the name of Sarge. At
Windhome, Sarge's station, Garrett learns how the Marsmen claw an
independent existence from the barren soil of Mars, and also how
the unyielding environment has shaped their culture, in which one's
word is a life or death bond. Inevitably, this culture comes into
conflict with the nanny state of the colonial administration, which
seeks to bring the liberty-loving Marsmen under its authority by taxing and
regulating them out of existence.
Garrett finds himself in the middle of an outright war of independence,
in which the Marsmen use their intimate knowledge of the planet as an
ally against what, on the face of it, would appear to be overwhelming
superiority of their adversaries. Garrett leads a bold mission to
obtain the game-changing resource which will allow Mars to deter
reprisals from Earth, and in doing so becomes a Marsman in every
way.
Pournelle paints this story with spare, bold brush strokes: all
non-essentials are elided, and the characters develop and
events transpire with little or no filler. If
Kim Stanley Robinson had told this story, it would
probably have occupied two thousand pages and have readers dying
of boredom or old age before anything actually happened. This
book delivers an action story set in a believable environment and
a society which has been shaped by it. Having been originally published
in the year of the Viking landings on Mars, there are a few things
it gets wrong, but there are a great many others which are spot-on,
and in some cases prophetic.
The second novel in the book,
King David's Spaceship,
is set in the
CoDominium
universe in which the classic novel
The Mote in God's Eye
takes place. The story occurs contemporarily with
The Mote, during the Second Empire of Man, when imperial
forces from the planet Sparta are re-establishing contact with
worlds of the original Empire of Man who have been cut off from
one another, with many reverting to primitive levels of technology
and civilisation in the aftermath of the catastrophic Secession Wars.
When Imperial forces arrive on Prince Samual's World, its civilisation
had recovered from disastrous post-collapse warfare and plague to
around the technological level of 19th century Earth. King David of
the Kingdom of Haven, who hopes to unify the planet under his rule,
forms an alliance with the Empire and begins to topple rivals and
petty kingdoms while pacifying the less civilised South Continent.
King David's chief of secret police learns, from an Imperial novel that
falls into his hands, that the Empire admits worlds on different bases
depending upon their political and technological evolution. Worlds
which have achieved planetary government and an indigenous space travel
capability are admitted as “classified worlds”, which retain
a substantial degree of autonomy and are represented in one house of
the Imperial government. Worlds which have not achieved these benchmarks
are classed as colonies, with their local governmental institutions
abolished and replaced by rule by an aristocracy of colonists imported
from other, more developed planets.
David realises that, with planetary unification rapidly approaching, his
days are numbered unless somehow he can demonstrate some kind of
space flight capability. But the Empire enforces a rigid
technology embargo against less developed worlds, putatively to
allow for their “orderly development”, but at least as
much to maintain the Navy's power and enrich the traders, who are a
major force in the Imperial capital. Nathan McKinnie, formerly a colonel
in the service of Orleans, a state whose independence was snuffed out
by Haven with the help of the Navy, is recruited by the ruthless secret
policeman Malcolm Dougal to lead what is supposed to be a trading
expedition to the world of Makassar, whose own civilisation is arrested
in a state like medieval Europe, but which is home to a “temple”
said to contain a library of documents describing First Empire technology
which the locals do not know how to interpret. McKinnie's mission is to
gain access to the documents, discover how to build a spaceship with the
resources available on Haven, and spirit this information back to his
home world under the eyes of the Navy and Imperial customs officials.
Arriving on Makassar, McKinnie finds that things are even more hopeless
than he imagined. The temple is in a city remote from where he landed,
reachable only by crossing a continent beset with barbarian hordes, or
a sea passage through a pirate fleet which has essentially shut down
seafaring on the planet. Using no advanced technology apart from the
knowledge in his head, he outfits a ship and recruits and trains a crew
to force the passage through the pirates. When he arrives at Batav, the
site of the temple, he finds it besieged by Islamic barbarians (some
things never change!), who are slowly eroding the temple's defenders
by sheer force of numbers.
Again, McKinnie needs no new technology, but simply knowledge of the
Western way of war—in
this case recruiting from the disdained
dregs of society and training a heavy infantry force, which he
deploys along with a newly disciplined heavy cavalry in tactical
doctrine with which
Cæsar would have been familiar. Having saved the
temple, he forms an alliance with representatives of the Imperial
Church which grants him access to the holy relics, a set of memory
cubes containing the collected knowledge of the First Empire.
Back on Prince Samual's World, a Los Alamos style research establishment
quickly discovers that they lack the technology to read the copies of
the memory cubes they've brought back, and that the technology of
even the simplest Imperial landing craft is hopelessly out of reach
of their knowledge and manufacturing capabilities. So, they adopt a
desperate fall back plan, and take a huge gamble to decide the fate of
their world.
This is superb science fiction which combines an interesting
premise, the interaction of societies at very different levels
of technology and political institutions, classical warfare at
sea and on land, and the difficult and often ruthless decisions
which must be made when everything is at stake (you will
probably remember the case of the Temple swordsmen long after
you close this book). It is wonderful that these excellent yarns
are back in print after far too long an absence.
November 2010 