I first read Poul Anderson’s The Enemy Stars in 1976, not all that long after its first publication in 1959. If I had not already been an Anderson fanboy, this book would have made me one. The novel had sense of wonder in spades, and the stock elements in the book were ones as yet unfamiliar to me. I was the ideal reader, being an undemanding, gullible fifteen-year-old. Later rereadings revealed some characteristic Poul Anderson weaknesses. Yet the book does one important thing right, which is why I still reread it from time to time.
Autocratic Earth dominates its extrasolar colonies thanks to a network of “mattercasters.” The mattercasters deliver people, or goods, instantaneously; however, the terminals must first be placed by ships operating at sublight speeds. Expanding the network of mattercasters is the work of generations. Humans have invested centuries in this task, but have only explored a tiny fraction of the Milky Way. For the ships placing the terminals, surprises are still the rule, not the exception.
When the Southern Cross encounters a dead star seemingly older than the current scientific estimate of the age of the universe, the sublight starship is diverted to take a closer look. Actual investigation falls to living humans: spoiled dilettante scientist Tarangi McClaren, newly married would-be colonist David Ryerson, covert revolutionary engineer Chang Sverdlov, and dutiful pilot Seiichi Nakamura. They take a hundred-light-year step to the dark system.
Once there, impatience leads to catastrophe. The quartet is marooned in a dead system, with their interstellar communicator destroyed. Even if they had been able to send out an SOS, the nearest starship would be decades away. The crew must find some way to harness the meagre resources of the dead star or die a light-century from home.
Mattercasters work by destructively scanning the original, beaming a hyper-accurate description to a distant ‘caster, which reconstructs the object. Modern readers may wonder why, if the mattercaster network has the bandwidth to do that, Earth doesn’t just remotely pilot their space probes. There’s no drama in inadvertently sending a space probe to its doom. Readers may also wonder why, if mattercasting is expensive, bulk goods like food are shipped from one system to another. Look! Over there! The Winged Victory of Samothrace!
For much of his career, Anderson wrote one-dimensional, stereotyped women characters. Anderson did eventually moderate his views somewhat¹, but readers looking for women with agency might avoid this book. There is one woman who exists to pine for her husband and one who exists to be a pretty set of ears into which McClaren can pour exposition. Neither of them is on the ship.
The men are underdeveloped as well. Eisenhower-era SF novels were short, not much longer than novellas today, which meant that there was little room for character development if plot, world-building, and endless exposition took up too many pages. Calling the characters stereotypes may be unduly harsh. Call them “stock characters.”
The setup doesn’t really make sense, the characters are thin, and the science is dated². So why reread this book?
Scale. Sense of wonder. This introductory passage about what it took to get Southern Cross from Sol to the dead star:
They manned her by turns, and dreamed other ships, and launched them, and saw how a few of the shortest journeys ended. Then they died.
And other men came after them. Wars flamed up and burned out, the howling peoples dwelt in smashed cities and kindled their fires with books. Conquerors followed, and conquerors of those, an empire killed its mother aborning, a religion called men to strange hilltops, a new race and a new state bestrode the Earth. But still the ships fell upward through night, and always there were men to stand watch upon them. Sometimes the men wore peaked caps and comets, sometimes steel helmets, sometimes decorous gray cowls, eventually blue berets with a winged star; but always they watched the ships, and more and more often as the decades passed they brought their craft to new harbors.
The universe is very, very big and humans are infinitesimal. Anderson embraces this in a way few of his contemporaries did. Anderson’s individual worlds are not Paramount backlot stages conveniently scaled to flatter the actors. His worlds are all as big as the Earth, some bigger, each unique.
That’s what SF promised the teen me … and what I still look for. Anderson delivered on the promise. He took worldbuilding very seriously. He understood the sheer immensity of the universe. He holds out no hope that humans will ever explore the whole universe, or know everything there is to be known³. No species will last long enough to explore and know completely. This is daunting, and at the same time, comforting. There will never be an end to wonder.
1: One side effect of this moderation was a number of incredibly defensive introductions to late 1970s reprints of his early work.
2: The failure to imagine space probes is more forgivable if you consider that the novel was published just before the first robot interplanetary probe was launched.
3: The Enemy Stars empire spans (roughly) the same chunk of the galaxy to which our radio signals may have reached. A handy map can be found at the other end of this link.
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 Young People Read Old SFF (where he is assisted by editor Karen Lofstrom and web person Adrienne L. Travis). He is surprisingly flammable.
In one of those meaningless coincidences that nevertheless meant a lot to me, I read The Enemy Stars the same evening that I first saw the classic SF movie Forbidden Planet, which one of the UWaterloo campus clubs was screening.
Anderson doesn’t get into it but I bet a lot the people forcibly transported to the stars see it as a form of execution. The people who walk into the scanning chambers are all disintegrated. Knowing there will be a copy who thinks they are the same person as the original may be cold comfort.
Like many other Anderson titles, this has been published under a different name: “We Have Fed Our Sea.”
P.S. A friendly librarian once gave me (!) 3 Anderson paperbacks when she realized that her library already had them under different titles, which is why I (40 years later) have copies of “Question and Answer” (also published as “Planet of No Return”), “The Man Who Counts” (aka “War of the Wingmen,”) and “World without Stars” (aka “The Ancient Gods”).
I got Planet of No Return and World Without Stars as part of The Worlds of Poul Anderson, along with The War of Two Worlds. Really irked me that only two of the stories had titles beginning with the word “World”.
Haha as soon as I saw the footnotes, I knew I was reading a James Davis Nicoll review :)
@2
A line from Kipling’s The Song of the Dead. One of the characters Kipples quite explicitly near the end, as I recall.
“We have fed our sea for a thousand years
And she calls us, still unfed,
Though there’s never a wave of all her waves
But marks our English dead:
We have strawed our best to the weed’s unrest,
To the shark and the sheering gull,
If blood be the price of admiralty,
Lord God, we ha’ paid it in full!—”
Anderson can write a lovely bit of prose, can’t he?
I really should re-read The Enemy Stars; some 50 years later…It’s nice to see that Anderson’s stories are discovered and read; considering what passes for SF on the screen these days. ‘Passengers’ sort of ripped off parts of PA’s Tau Zero and that novel would be so easy to do with a small budget. Big ideas! The end of the Universe! No Michael Sheen bartender! Heh George Lucas you lived just down the coast from Poul. Did Ensign Flandry from 1966 and the Terran Empire influence you? If I recall, Tabitha Falkyn in People of the Wind (1973) was a more 3 dimensional woman . You are aware that Winston P Sanders was a pen name for the Asteroid Stories? The End
Welcome to tor.com, James!
Happy to be here!
I’ve read most of Anderson’s work, but I seem to have overlooked this one. I have a feeling that it would have been better encountered during my youth. It does not sound like it has aged well.
It aged better than The Makeshift Rocket, which among other things demonstrated why it was at this point in Anderson’s career it was better if one of his books lacked any on stage women than if it had them.
I’m kind of curious how Virgin Planet has stood the test of time.
I’ve come to enjoy Anderson’s work more and more through the years, and I hope his work is remembered. I recently read all of his Technic Civilization stories and I’m looking forward to his Psychotechnic League stories which Baen is republishing.
It’s true that writing strong women is a weak point for Anderson, but I believe he got a little better later in his career; he spent that career trying to grow as a writer. But he understood that people of all nationalities would travel into space; look at the names of his characters in THE ENEMY STARS — Tarangi McClaren, David Ryerson, Chang Sverdlov, and Seiichi Nakamura. No women among them, of course, and we cast a wider net than just nationality in our quest for diverse characters these days, but Anderson was still ahead of his time compared to the majority of writers who were his contemporaries.
I would read an anthology of James’ bio blurbs.
@13 The awareness that the future might contain people that weren’t English and perhaps Scottish was something Anderson shared with H. Beam Piper. I feel like Piper’s politics were worse but his female characters were better.
In many ways, Piper was very progressive for his time. Take the oft-anthologized tale “Omnilingual,” where the archaeologist who finds the key to translating the Martian language is a woman.
On the other hand, in his stories, people were constantly smoking, a practice that is dying out. And constantly drinking highballs, which are still consumed today, but not under that name.
Reading the Fuzzy books gives me the impression nobody gets lung cancer from all the smoking because they die of cirrhosis from all the drinking first.
“Reading the Fuzzy books gives me the impression nobody gets lung cancer from all the smoking because they die of cirrhosis from all the drinking first. “
Don’t forget the ones who get shot by Old Man Holloway!
@18: I remember when I read Brown’s “Night of the Jabberwock” wondering not so much whether the hero would solve the mystery, but rather whether (given the amount of drinking he did) he would still be capable of walking by the end of the book.
The names David Ryerson and Seiichi Nakamura lack the “true internationalism” sought, perhaps longed for, by many, but I’d not be inclined to berate them for that. Others would.
Thanks for this review: I remember reading the book 40-odd years ago – I collected SF paperbacks from second-hand shops and book exchanges, which meant you could get OLD copies – and enjoyed it thoroughly enough then that I can remember the names even now.
I really liked Anderson: as a teenager his florid prose and great descriptive passages really stimulated me; his physics and his stories were also great especially in the context of series like the Flandry and Polesotechnic League books. As I got older I realised that his women were two-dimensional and his politics were a little right wing, but hey, that ship had already sailed with Heinlein.
I am amazed, though, that no-one saw the potential in filmic versions of the Flandry or Nicholas van Rijn books: the former especially could have out Star Warred Star Wars (AND had better names, and physics). Maybe there’s still time??
All the Golden Age writers seem to have a problem writing women. Possibly it’s because their target audience was young males afraid of girl cooties, or because they themselves had limited experience with women and were uncomfortable writing them. Isaac Asimov confesses as much in his comments on his early work.
Having edited 7 Poul Anderson books for NESFA PRESS, a number of the women who proofread the books made the same comments about Anderson and women characters. The bulk of Anderson was written pre 1970 when perceptions were different. One sedies not mentioned was the Time Patrol stories which originally were dominated by Manse Everard. Wanda Tamberly is introduced in “The Year of the Ransom” and holds her own.
“A Bicycle Built for Brew”, Anderson’s preferred title, republished by Ace as “The Makeshift Rocket” is a very funny story and not every story has to have strong women or strong men, for that natter. Stories that have strong women and weak men rarely get critised by those who complain about weak women characters. The stories are written to be enjoyed, not analyzed to their death.
If you stop and think about it, there is no reason for current trends to continue indefinitely into the future. I was re-reading A.E. van Vogt’s classic mutant tale, Slan, a couple of years ago, when I came to the scene in which Jommy Cross jumps onto the running board of a ground vehicle. Anachronism? Then again, why shouldn’t ground vehicles in the distant future have running boards?
Similarly, why should we believe that in all future societies women will be at least as liberated as in Western countries today?
One obvious scenario is the continuing expansion of fundamentalist Islam – but that, too, is a trend that need not continue indefinitely.
A subtler idea relies on natural selection: now that motherhood is voluntary, at least in the West, we are selecting for the desire to become a mother. Women who are not interested in the “mommy track“ are gradually eliminating themselves from the gene pool.
A third scenario posits a society in which it is easy to change biological sex any time you want to (and the change goes all the way down to the cellular level, unlike today). It’s not inconceivable that people might choose to be male while pursuing a career, and then switch to female to bear and raise a family, and then back again. This would give the appearance of a very sexist society, but that would be an illusion (I think).
@25/taras: “A subtler idea relies on natural selection: now that motherhood is voluntary, at least in the West, we are selecting for the desire to become a mother. Women who are not interested in the “mommy track“ are gradually eliminating themselves from the gene pool.”
But isn’t the same true for men? So, humanity as a whole will become more fond of children. And let’s not forget the people who are too disorganised to use contraceptives. Humanity will become more fond of children and more disorganised. At least in the West. Provided that these traits are hereditary.
“It’s not inconceivable that people might choose to be male while pursuing a career, and then switch to female to bear and raise a family, and then back again.”
I would switch to male when my children get too old and heavy for me to carry them for an extended period of time or whirl them around in the air. Physical strength can be a real asset for parents. In contrast, I can’t think of many jobs where it would be of advantage to be male in a technologically advanced society.
@26/JanaJansen: “I would switch to male when my children get too old and heavy …” Genetic engineering would make it possible to make women bigger and stronger, stronger than the men if so desired.
I don’t know of any science fiction that uses this idea, though by now somebody must have. David Brin’s Glory Season (1993) features a sort of genetically engineered Rube Goldberg machine that maintains female dominance on a colony world. If they’d simply made the women bigger than the man, I guess the book would have been a lot shorter!
Women are smaller and less muscular than men, on average, merely because our species evolved under food shortages, so the women most successful in reproducing were the ones most efficient at reserving calories for growing and feeding offspring.
You raise an interesting question, about the effect on men of the new evolutionary situation the human race finds itself in. Just as, up to now, natural selection has steered males away from females who are too young, or too old, or too unhealthy, or too skinny to bear children (or pregnant already), can evolution steer males toward females who will choose to have babies and away from those who won’t?
I’m not sure. The desire to have children is not something that shows on the outside, like youth or health or physical attributes, so evolution has little to work with. Similarly, we can expect child-desiring women to continue to have a hard time figuring out which males will make good dads.
#26 & #27,
John Varley uses the idea of easy body redo’s in his short fiction. People change gender about as easily as getting a tattoo. In fact, children can have teachers who present as children to build a connection.
@27/taras: I was thinking of physical strength because that seems to be the main advantage in being male. If women become stronger by genetic engineering, or perhaps simply by wearing helpful futuristic technology, and if there’s no more sexism, then why change gender at all?
Concerning the desire to have children, people talk to each other, so men who want children can choose women who want children even if it doesn’t show on the outside. As long as people team up to raise their children together, and even decide jointly whether they want to have another child or not, good fathers will have more children than bad fathers. Also, if the desire to have children is genetically transferred, men may inherit it from their mothers.
@28/PamAdams: Actually, John Varley is exactly who I had in mind. But the reference seemed dated, and I deleted it so the cool sci-fi kids wouldn’t sneer at me. [;)]
I remember his story about the guy who impulsively becomes a woman and then, after the novelty palls, spends the rest of the story trying to get back his original body. That cracked me up!
“Children can have teachers who present as children to build a connection“. That story I don’t remember, and it seems a little bit creepy. Useful? Probably. In Among Schoolchildren, Tracy Kidder describes a pint-sized bully who terrorizes all the other little kids, while the teachers do nothing about it. Maybe, if teachers had to deal with that kid at his own level, they wouldn’t have been so slow to act.
@29/JanaJansen: “Why change gender at all?” My suggestion was a possibility, not a prediction. In any case, we know that people do want to change sex, even given the severe limitations of current medical technology, so some people probably will in the future, too.
Athletics might be one reason. Male hips are designed for walking, running, and jumping. Female hips are designed for walking, running, and jumping – and bearing children. Evolution is pushing hard: higher intelligence => larger brain => larger head => wider hips. According to Science Daily, anthropologists in the British Isles can see this process going on up to the present, as they examine human remains over the last 2000 years.
“Good fathers will have more children than bad fathers“. Yes – and no. We can see a pattern among successful men of: marriage, children; remarriage, more children; etc. If memory serves, for example, John Wayne had eight children by three wives. So evolution maybe selecting for good fathers – and bad husbands!
Lastly, “if the desire to have children is genetically transferred, men may inherit it from their mothers.“ Good point!
@31/taras: Okay, athletics is a good reason. Another one that just occurred to me: get a different singing voice.
@25:
This assumes that the desire to have children is largely genetic. Such evidence as there is on the matter (not much) seems to suggest that such desires are largely learned or environmentally / experientially shaped, and so are not subject to natural selection at all. In any case more or less voluntary motherhood (in the modern sense at least) has not been around long enough for any evolutionary effect to be evident — check back in a few thousand years, given human’s rather long generation times (say 30 years/gen on average).
@25/26, I can’t imagine even wanting to be a man, is there something wrong with me?
@33 — Note that this is merely one speculative idea of several, all making the point that the feminist trend of recent generations, at least in the West, is not absolutely guaranteed to continue forever.
It’s good enough science for an SF story, in any case.
Going beyond that …
Given that, in every society that exists, or ever existed, women are, on average, more interested in children than men are, it’s virtually certain that there is a genetic component to this. It’s why more men than women abandon their children, and why we have “cat ladies” but not many “cat gentlemen”.
Admittedly, there’s a lot of “Darwin denialism” around these days, among people who don’t like the implications — or, perhaps, what they mistakenly think are the implications — of scientific findings about sex differences.
How fast might natural selection be operating today? DNA studies show human evolution is speeding up, not slowing down. Cultural change doesn’t replace evolution, it just changes its direction; for example, selecting for genes (i.e., alleles) that help one resist addictive drugs.
Happy fifth anniversary, my first piece on tor dot com.
@@@@@#27 – Genetic engineering would make it possible to make women bigger and stronger, stronger than the men if so desired.
I don’t know of any science fiction that uses this idea, though by now somebody must have.
How quickly time passes. Most of Becky Chambers characters are queer in one way or another, including a ship that falls in love and acquires a human body to fulfill that desire, and an exploring ship crew with one ace, one trans, one bi, and one lesbian (I think : their sexual expression was not essential to the story)
@@@@@#28 John Varley uses the idea of easy body redo’s in his short fiction.
Good point. Tanith Lee had the same idea even earlier in the Bee novels.
@@@@@#34 I can’t imagine even wanting to be a man, is there something wrong with me?
I’ve been a lot happier as a woman since I passed menopause. Now if only doctors would remember that the original Pill was meant to be taken every single day and the women using it would never have a period.