Imagine for the moment that one is a member of a technologically advanced civilization. Further suppose that one stumbles across an unfamiliar world populated by beings whose technical sophistication is far below yours. There are two (preliminary) options, here: one can either make overt contact or one can avoid it.
For historical reasons—that throughout Earth history, first contact between dissimilar cultures was generally followed by vigorous efforts by whichever culture enjoyed a military advantage to strip-mine the other of goods and services—many science fiction authors (particularly during the mid-century period when various empires were winding down) gave their settings laws encouraging non-interference. One might call this a Prime Directive.
While non-interference has the advantage that one will not have directly caused calamity, it can be hard for observers to sit on their hands watching disasters well within their ability to prevent or mitigate because of a non-interference pact.1 Furthermore, it’s hard to gin up a satisfactory plot from total non-interference. Just ask Uatu the Watcher. So…there seems to be a tendency for many SF works that mention such a directive to actually be about efforts to circumvent it.
There are many such works. Here are a canonical five.
“Finished” by L. Sprague de Camp (1949)
Unlike many Prime Directives, the misleadingly named Interplanetary Council’s codicil against supplying advanced technology to underdeveloped worlds like Krishna has very little to do with what’s best for those worlds’ inhabitants. The Council’s concern is that some extra-terrestrial Genghis Khan armed with purchased WMDs might then turn them on the members of the IC. Therefore, as long as the technological embargo is maintained, the Council is perfectly happy to allow its citizens to play tourist on Krishna.
Krishnans are neither blind nor stupid. Prince Ferrian of Sotaspé orchestrates a bold plan to smuggle illicit information past the watchful eyes of the IC guardians. Thus, the otherwise inexplicable steam-powered warship. Nor is the prince foolish enough to have just one scheme. If the off-worlders somehow manage to deal with his steamboat—and they most certainly will try—Ferrian has a back-up plan about which the off-worlders can do absolutely nothing.
***
The Still, Small Voice of Trumpets by Lloyd Biggle, Jr. (1968)
The members of the Federation of Independent Worlds are, without exception, planetary democracies. Worlds not so governed are not accepted as members, nor are they informed of the Federation’s existence. Instead, the Interplanetary Relations Bureau, IPR for short, covertly monitors promising worlds. One might expect from the motto emblazoned on IPR base walls—”DEMOCRACY IMPOSED FROM WITHOUT IS THE SEVEREST FORM OF TYRANNY”—that strict non-interference is the rule. In fact, subtle nudges are allowed, provided they are so subtle as to remain undetected.
Kurr’s absolute monarchy has proven extraordinarily resistant to IPR’s methods. For four centuries, IPR agents have watched in despair as the kingdom stagnated. Cultural Survey agent Jef Forzon arrives knowing nothing about Kurr’s peculiar history, and no idea why someone specializing in art has been seconded to the IPR base there. He quickly discovers that the team’s dire assessment of Kurr is hopelessly optimistic. The situation in Kurr is far worse than the IPR realizes.
***
Decision at Doona by Anne McCaffrey (1969)
Although the majority of humans are far too cosseted and decadent to consider trading Earth’s overcrowded cities for pioneering lives on frontier worlds, the tiny minority of non-degenerates are sufficient to establish colonies…provided empty worlds can be found for them. Humanity’s first attempt to make contact with an alien race ended with the total extinction of the contactees. Ever since then, humans have followed a strict non-interference policy.
Doona seems a perfect candidate for settlement, offering verdant wilderness and a reassuring lack of natives. However, hardly have the men established a foothold that could house the shipload of women and children even now approaching Doona than an alien community is discovered a mere stone’s throw from the human village. More to the point, the human village is discovered by the aliens. A supposedly comprehensive planetary survey managed to overlook a thriving alien civilization. What then for non-interference?
***
Enchantress From the Stars by Sylvia Louise Engdahl (1970)
Unlike certain Federations one could name, the Federation in Engdahl’s SF fable is so dedicated to non-interference that it conceals the Federation’s very existence from worlds too immature to join the galactic government. Instead, it adheres to a strict policy of covertly monitoring and documenting lesser civilizations, even the starfaring ones. Those worlds that survive the natural maturation process are welcomed into the Federation. Those that self-doom are left to their fate.
Pre-industrial Andrecia presents the Federation with an uncomfortable edge case. Andrecia has been noticed by the Empire and deemed suitable for brutal exploitation. Cultures eliminating themselves with nuclear fire are one thing. Innocents being invaded by off-world imperialists are quite another. However, the Federation’s laws are quite strict: if the Federation’s Anthropology Service is to save Andrecia, it will have to use means that do not reveal to either Andrecia or the Empire that the Federation exists.
The Federation’s plan depends on Ilura, a powerful psychic. Ilura swiftly becomes too dead to play her role.2 The only available replacement? A young, untrained stowaway named Elana…
***
The Monitor, the Miners and the Shree by Lee Killough (1980)
Before it fell, the Galactic Union demonstrated why interference in backward worlds was a bad idea. The Sodality that replaced the Union therefore adheres to non-interference. There is no leeway for oversights or lapses. When the native Shree were discovered on Nira in the wake of a Sodality mining operation being established on that planet, the operations were shut down and the off-worlders evacuated. In the centuries since, the only interferences permitted were covert Department of Surveys and Charters surveys, carried out once every half-millennium.
Newly minted monitor Chemel Krar is in charge of the latest survey. She has no intention of permitting any of her subordinates to reveal the Sodality’s existence to the Shree. Pity that by the time the team sets down on Nira, the Shree have been in contact with off-worlders for centuries. Too bad that some of the off-worlders responsible would rather kill the entire research team than risk the legal penalties for illicit contact.
Chemel evades capture and the ensuing attempts to kill her. However, her surviving teammates have scattered, leaving Chemel marooned on her own. This forces an awkward choice on the monitor: spend her life hiding from Shree and off-world traders? Or try to alert the Sodality by allying with the very natives nobody is supposed to contact?
***
Establishing and then subverting non-interference pacts is a highly popular pastime for SF authors. No doubt examples abound, but I don’t have the time to trek through the whole of science fiction looking for them. Please feel free to mention and discuss interesting works in the comments below.
In the words of Wikipedia editor TexasAndroid, prolific book reviewer and perennial Darwin Award nominee James Davis Nicoll is of “questionable notability.” His work has appeared in Publishers Weekly and Romantic Times as well as on his own websites, James Nicoll Reviews and the Aurora finalist Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is a four-time finalist for the Best Fan Writer Hugo Award and is surprisingly flammable.
[1]A theme explored in Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s “Hard to Be a God,” in which the directive forbidding meaningful interference is actually adhered to.
[2]Ilura allows herself to be killed by Empire soldiers rather than reveal that she was a member of a superior culture.
I found James Cambias’ A Darkling Sea a wonderful consideration of this topic. And a great ending!
In Christopher Anvil’s Interstellar Patrol story “The Royal Road”, the Planetary Development Agency have strict rules against using techniques like bribery or force to influence the development of non-human cultures. But they’re prepared to look the other way if subtler, more deniable forms of influence happen to bring about the desired outcome.
Carpe Diem* by Sharon Lee and Steve Miller: Two stranded “aliens” manage to blend in and make a life for themselves—right up until the life of one is dependent on accessing the medical facilities of a more recently stranded shuttle.
*part of the Liaden Universe series
I think H. Beam Piper’s novel Little Fuzzy fits this category nicely. Piper wrote some fantastic and fun sci-fi.
Piper’s Federation didn’t have anything close to a Prime Directive. It was more a British Empire IIIIIIIINNNNNNNN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE, and any natives the Federation stumbled over would get its own colonial government. Uller Uprising is a very, very thinly disguised re-telling of the Great Mutiny.
@6/JDN: I haven’t read Piper in over 40 years. Thanks for setting me straight.
Little Fuzzy and Fuzzy Sapiens left the impression that Class IV (natives) worlds could well be much worse off than Class III (no natives) worlds, depending on how skilfully the colonial government managed the immediate consequences of a world being declared Class IV.
Interestingly, stories set after the Fuzzy books mention sunstones, which come from their planet, but not Fuzzies. As the stories establish, the Fuzzy have a nutrition-related fertility problem. Perhaps more importantly, the humans treat them like children and farm them out to humans who want their own Fuzzies. It could be there was a proximity or lack there of fertility issue.
The twist in Doona is that the cat people are also colonists and equally nervous of first contacts.
Also Cat People!
The Confederacy of Vega has an entire department, Zone Agents, dedicated to breaking the prime directive.
The same thing is quite popular in urban fantasy. Wizard Harry Dresden, for example, is always dragging the humans around him into the magical world and war to the horror of the Wizard Council and other magical councils. Some people just can’t keep their mouths shut.
This topic really should not be discussed without space for Hard to be a God, the outstanding Russian novel by Arkady and Boris Strugatski (orig. publ. as Trudno byt’ bogom, 1964). Few stories so viscerally plumb the conditions that precipitate the intervention, nor address the consequences.
Shooting fish in a barrel time: Jerry Pournelle’s King David’s Spaceship can be argued to be of this genre, if somewhat more along the lines of “the Empire of Man will subjugate you and colonize the hell out of your planet—unless you can prove you are worthy of actual planetary membership as a vassal state by building an orbit-capable spacecraft first”. Which is great news, if you happen to be just about at a tech level to have discovered gunpowder and steam engines …
Julian May’s Galactic Milieu novels feature the Galactic civilization watching worlds covertly until they are ready to tolerate contact.
Was it Asimov or Clarke who wrote the short story, “Silly Asses”, along these lines? A galactic civilization is ready to induct Earth into the fold after long observation – until they discover that Earth is testing nuclear devices within their own atmosphere, at which point Earth gets crossed off of the list…
“Silly Asses” was published by Asimov and can be found in his collection, Buy Jupiter and Other Stories.
11: I am delighted to direct you to footnote one, which reads
Eleanor Arnason’s A Woman of the Iron People has the debate about interference / non-interference at its core. Spoilers: In the end, the advanced civilization decides to ask the people on the planet itself what should be done.
@16: I did see the footnote but it reads dismissively of the novel, as if the transgression that forms the bulk of the narrative did not occur. It seems like that book is more seriously about a Directive and the why&wherefores than the 5 that comprise the list. The Strugatskis’ novels frequently get shorter shrift than warranted.
The only reason it’s in a footnote is because the field agents stick to the rules and this is about books where they do not. Otherwise my issue with their novels is mainly with the subpar translations I read in the 1970s.
(I am not 100 percent sure I could come up with five examples where cultures with a Prime Directive actually stick to them. Hard to Be God, and? Even in the Helliconia novels, the observers from time to time make contact)
I must say that I prefer the Sweet cover of Decision at Doona.
One of Adam-Troy Castro’s stories had to do with an alien species that was entirely oblivious of any outside contact. An evil human viciously murdered one of the aliens; the aliens of course didn’t notice. The legal team has to decide whether he’s guilty of murder and what the punishment should be.
I don’t have a lot of time this minute to look up the title, or to justify why this fits the prime directive theme but it pretty much does.
Strange that a cover containing nothing but cats was published by Corgi.
Such are the vagaries of the publishing world. Or fate. Or something.
@15 C Samuels yes, that’s it – I loved that collection, thanks!
I seem to remember a TV show from half a century ago that spent a lot of episodes with the characters trekking from star to star while wrestling with non-interference rules. But I can’t remember the name…
In one of his too-rare short stories, Iain Banks makes it clear that The Culture has two approaches to “backwards” worlds. One is a very strict don’t-interfere-but-monitor, which is done to random worlds for scientific purposes, and it turns Earth was one of the lucky winners. The other is, pretty much, “let’s invite these guys to the party.”
@9, @20: the cover here is pretty Sweet. :-) But less so since, referring to http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/titlecovers.cgi?5527 it goes onto the back cover and there’s hundreds of those guys… presumably ALL staring… not to say, alarmingly identical.
ISFDB thinks that the staring contest and the 1981 butt-shot cover are both by Bruce Pennington, but I think the crediting is uncertain, and the critter designs look different. There are like 100 slightly varied shots of a painting of what I’ll call a Japanese-ish bridge under construction that seems to be identified as by Darrell K. Sweet: that one?
Very glad to see Enchantress from the Stars on this list. As a teenager in the early 1970’s, I loved this book. It was a time when YA was not yet a category, and libraries were only beginning to have “teen” sections distinct from the children’s books. Enchantress was great for a smart teenager…and still is; I was very happy when it was reissued a few years ago, and I could buy new copies for young female relatives. It was also a find for adolescent me because the protagonist was a teenage girl. I read Middle Earth and Prydain and Earthsea and science fiction and historical fiction, and hardly any of it had female protagonists, though there were some fine female characters. Elana is a well-rounded, smart, ethical, realistically imperfect character, a great change from the bathetic kid sister (Cold Equations), the self-sacrificial astronaut (Deborah’s Children), the exotic female object of the male gaze, etc. Also, the way she presents herself to the young man on the planet in order to hide her true origin is intriguing.
@19: I think you hit on the right nail with your comment about adherence being the exception; I guess then that the breaking of rules makes better fiction than adherence. I would love to see a list of “five examples where cultures with a Prime Directive actually stick to them.”
(In other news, the more recent translations of the Strugatskis’ works are far superior, particularly The Inhabited Island and Roadside Picnic. If only such could occur with much of Lem!)
I’m not a huge Sci-Fi person, more keen on the other F in SFF, and the first thing I thought of when I saw this title is “Sixth of the Dusk”. The Prime Directive is only mentioned, not the focus of the story but I found the pretence to virtue and the will to colonize pretty damned sinister (and realistic).
Doona is an edge case; the Terrans are trying very hard not to interfere, but the non-Terrans aren’t having it — for reasons noted in @9, with a side of paranoia.
Anderson’s “The Three-Cornered Wheel” (one of his Polesotechnic League stories) has a mixed trio complying-but-not-complying with a religious ban on anything circular (e.g. wheels), in order to move something heavy some distance to save themselves; by the end of the story everyone whose head isn’t buried knows the religion is headed for the dumpster (not to mention how much faster the world will ~progress). I remember another story in which they make contact with ?Merseia? — and permanently screw up relations because they deal with the local-equivalent-of-the-Mafia as being the only worldwide organization. (Anderson didn’t know much about organized crime.)
The ultimate breakage might be Mack Reynolds’s The Rival Rigellians, in which a shipload of Terran explorers is ~evenly split as to whether capitalism or communism is preferable; since Rigel has two inhabited pre-space planets, the Terrans decide to use them both as a controlled experiment.
I don’t count his Section G stories, just as I don’t count Barnes’s Thousand Cultures stories, as both of them involve getting Terran colonies to Grow The F*** Up.
There’s The Snow Queen by Vinge. The planet Tiamat is allowed only limited access to technology because, supposedly, they’re not ready for it. The real reason is that the planet is the only source for an immortality drug, and Starways Congress intends to keep control of it.
Jane Yolen’s book, Cards of Grief, has an interstellar civilization that has strict protocols for first contact, meant to limit damage. But, the isolated world of the novel has a culture where grieving is a central, ritualized part of their lives. Contact with a civilization that is almost their polar opposite in how it deals with death (ours) changes them.
@30
“I remember another story in which they make contact with Merseia — and permanently screw up relations …”
Which of course comes back to bite them on the ass. By the time of the Terran Empire (the Flandry stories) portion of Anderson’s Technic History cycle, of which the Polesotechnic League was an earlier sequence, Merseia is the Terran Empire’s most dangerous rival.
If either of the imperial powers in that saga ever had non-interference rules, they pretty much trashed them, as illustrated in both Ensign Flandry and A Stone in Heaven.
@28 Michael Kandel’s Lem translations are some of the best translations I’ve ever read, in or out of genre. A shame he’s never been turned loose on Solaris, but that aside I’d say Lem’s been pretty well served.
Yeah, I appreciate DAW’s efforts in exposing teenage me to authors from outside l’anglosphere but I wish he’d picked a better translator than Wendayne Ackerman.
(Five translated SF books for which superior translations now exist? Starting with Verne, because early Verne translations were dreadful)
Basically ALL of Ursula K Le Guin’s Hainish Cycle.
And I’m with MattS: Hard to be a God rocks. (Word to the wise: DON’T watch the recent movie “adaptation.”)
I can’t bring any titles to mind at present, but stories where the directive is adhered to seem to me to fall into two categories:
1. Someone is stranded on a planet and needs to get off it without violating the directive.
2. A villain is plotting to violate the directive and needs to be stopped.
@31 – I remember loving Yolen’s Cards of Grief when I read it as a teen. There was a particularly beautiful poem in there which I copied into my poetry journal at the time (ah to be a teen with the luxury of a poetry journal again!).
“Grieve for me, young lord,
When I am earth and you are sky
And only the syllables of song
Dropping like rain, rising like dew
between.”
@30
My recollection is that the Rigellian worlds were technologically regressed human colonies, putting it in the same category as your other two examples.
@19 There is no Prime Directive in Hard to Be a God. The problem with attempted interference is not that the local culture should not be interfered with but that the interfertence should be left to the trained professionals (see progressor).
Can’t remember the title, but I read a short story/novella (probably written in the 60s) about a peace corps-style mission sent to a low-tech planet to rescue them from environmental collapse. Crewmen from the ship provoke conflict that results in hundreds of locals dead. In the end it turns out the mission planner expected this, so that Earth would never again be tempted to interfere–while still having saved this race. Anyone recall the title/author?
And there was the short story (later expanded into a novel) about a “shipwrecked” spaceman who educates a whole planet into the knowledge needed to qualify as a full member of whichever galactic body it is rather than an exploited colony. Sorry i really cannot remember the title or author…..
@41: was it “Monument”, by Lloyd Biggle Jr?
MByerly (10): I sometimes wondered why Buffy Summers and team would invent mundane explanations for supernatural events. Okay, you don’t want to look crazy, but what’s wrong with silence? When a muggle notices that something is up, don’t deny it; let them work it out themself, and then you might have a new ally.
Peter Westlake (42): Beat me by eight minutes!
C. J. Cherryh’s Foreigner series ????
@42: it certainly sounds like Monument — although the key to the knowledge was use of galactic case law, which is a long way from build-a-fire-and-have-language (Little Fuzzy), build a spaceship (see @12), or most of the other tokens SF writers have thought of as defining civilization. (See, e.g., Anderson’s discussion of how various parts of a university changed when rules of magic were discovered: ~”The law school was not much affected; its work was never of this world.” (“Operation Salamander”))
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon is about a planet that was thought to have no indigenous sentient beings and a corporation out humans on it to exploit it. When it was determined that there were indeed sentients there the workers were evacuated by the corporation. Except one woman didn’t evacuate and her interactions with the population were quite beneficent for the planet and for quite a few others.
While Iain M Banks’ Culture doesn’t have a blanket non-interference directive, a fair number of the novels have a setup around a formal Culture policy of non-interference in whatever the particular situation is (planet, afterlife, stored memories), and Contact’s kick-ass approach to circumventing that while allowing for plausible deniability.
As to Hard To Be A God, I’ve read it in English translation; my Russian is about up to plowing through a Chekhov short story, slowly, with a dictionary.
However, two comments, one relevant to the theme, one not.
First, and relevant, it is most clearly NOT a story in which a version of the prime directive actually worked: the climax occurs when the alien observer’s native girlfriend is murdered by the villain’s henchmen and he (Don Rumata/Anton) outs with his sword, kills hordes of the bad guys, culminating with the assassination of the villain, the leader of a highly influential native cultural movement. Star Fleet did a better job.
Secondly, it’s not particularly science fiction. It could just as well have been set in siglo de oro Spain, wlike Arturo Perez-Reverte’s Capitano Alatriste stories, which the Strugatskys’ opus rather resembles, although Alatriste is better written. (Perhaps unfair; I read Alatriste in Spanish. I MAY consider going back to the Strugatskys when my Russian has improved, but what I’ve read of theirs in translation has been underwhelming; more likely I’ll go straight to Lukyanenko, when I can).
I make three imaginative ideas in this story which might have qualified it as SF: the training system that made Don Rumata able to fight his way through an army to kill the bad guy, the background society that produced Anton and the other observers, and space travel, but they are all so far in the background as to be dispensable without major changes in the story line. Anton could just as well have been a British cavalier in Spain.
@@@@@ 30, chip137:
Anderson’s “The Three-Cornered Wheel” (one of his Polesotechnic League stories) has a mixed trio complying-but-not-complying with a religious ban on anything circular (e.g. wheels), in order to move something heavy some distance to save themselves; by the end of the story everyone whose head isn’t buried knows the religion is headed for the dumpster (not to mention how much faster the world will ~progress).
IIRC, in that story the chief trader threw a monkey wrench into their theology. He taught them the Kabala. “Noninterference be damned! This is a culture that should be kicked apart.”
Does anybody understand how their Rube Goldberg third-of-a-circle contraption worked? I just can’t picture it.
If you ever visit Britain, look at the seven-sided 20p and 50p coins. They work fine in a mechanical coin machine because the centres of each of the seven arcs are the opposite corner. A roller consisting of a pizza slice will roll fine through its limited travel of angle; seven pizza slices handing off works perpetually through a complete circle.
Any odd number works just as well, including three–> Reuleaux_triangle
@@@@@ 50, Del:
Thanks.