[bala · home]
[okadenamatī · reviews]
[mesaramatiziye · other writings]
[tedbezī · languages]
language: English
country: USA
year: 1974
form: novel
genre(s): science fiction
dates read: 7.8.23-14.8.23
I was pleasantly surprised by Poul Anderson’s Fire Time, which I picked up entirely on the basis that the cover art has a centaur on it. it turns out, as a bonus, that the centaurs are feline, although the downside is that they’re symbionts who have (e.g.) plants growing out of their skin, so that’s a bit of a bummer.
anyway, the main narrative is framed by an account of a group of condemned criminals from the world humans call Ishtar coming to give a full account of what they’ve done to the president of Earth before he weighs in on the sentencing for their case. the bulk of the narrative is — ostensibly — this account. Ishtar is part of a triple star system — one red main-sequence star, one white dwarf, and one wildly erratic yellow star, whose orbit within the system only brings it close to Ishtar once every thousand years.
this periastron has historically heralded “the death of civilization”, between rapid environmental change as the equatorial parts of the planet become substantially hotter and population displacement. this time around, the “civilized” inhabitants of the southern continent, collectively known as the Gathering, are threatened by an organized invasion by “barbarians” from the northern continent, rather than simply chaotic mass migrations. this situation is further complicated by the presence of a few thousand humans — mainly scientists and their families, or descendants of scientists — who have been present on Ishtar for about a hundred and fifty years and who have been more or less embraced by the Gathering. the humans have been working with the Gathering on a number of (essentially) ~climate resilience~ projects designed to ensure that “civilization” survives this periastron. in the middle of all of this, a proxy war breaks out between Earth — under whose authority the humans on Ishtar fall — and an alien polity over a world both have colonized; as such, nonessential work, like the projects on Ishtar, is suspended, and a naval officer arrives on Ishtar to establish a military government. things rapidly escalate out of control, culminating in the deployment of a tactical nuclear missile against the “barbarians” despite injunctions from Earth not to interfere in “local” politics, both to avoid entangling Earth in them and to avoid “cultural imperialism“.
in many ways it’s very compelling: Ishtarian society is not as intensively portrayed as Velm in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, but Anderson clearly put a lot of thought and effort not only into Ishtarian political and social organization but the minutiae of everyday life and how these things might vary from place to place. the narration is focalized through four human characters (one of whom, a soldier fighting in Earth’s proxy war, only gets one chapter, clearly intended as a reflection on the brutality and futility of the Vietnam War — the book was published in 1974) and two Ishtarian characters, one the “barbarian” leader and one a military leader from the Gathering. through Arnanak (the “barbarian”) and Larreka it does a good job emphasizing the extent to which this invasion is both the product of understandable material conditions and something that could have been prevented if the Gathering hadn’t conceived of itself as the sole “civilization” on Ishtar and convinced humans to accept that framing and so provide assistance only to the Gathering. Arnanak’s goal is the same as the Gathering’s: he wants to ensure that his people survive this periastron (or Fire Time), and he’s pursuing that goal in the best way he can see to do so, by displacing the Gathering as the principle power so that humans will have to assist him instead.
unfortunately, the book undercuts itself by first having the humans absolutely fail to grasp this (at best there’s a mildly regretful, “oh, yeah, we probably should have considered the people of the northern continent, too…well, too bad!”). despite the book’s rightful wariness about human imperialism, its human characters ultimately obviously see Ishtar and Ishtarians in strictly utilitarian terms, as essentially objects of study that humans can learn from and as gateways — or, in the “barbarians’” case, barriers — to new avenues of scentific inquiry. but instead of presenting this, and the drastic steps they take on the basis of this, like the aforementioned tactical nuke, as critical flaws, or even as, like, just fucked up, or seeing the climax of the novel as an example of scientific hubris and callousness, the novel says, “they were in a bad situation but they made the correct choices for the good of humanity”, and a) I just don’t feel like that’s true and b) there are a few thousand humans on this planet versus millions of Ishtarians.
it does, however, retain its critical attitude towards the Earth-Naqsan war, and the one upside of its politics is that it is clear that without that war and the restrictions on supplies and civilian activities on Ishtar, the outcome of the conflict would have been different. it’s not clear to me, however, how the “humanitarian” intervention the humans were originally working on isn’t still a kind of cultural imperialism, especially since it’s providing aid to only one polity (albeit a continent-spanning one) on a whole planet. there was also the silly reflexive anticommunism, but that was so silly that I could just laugh and move on.
the writing is excellent — Arnanak’s portions are archaically stylized, presumably to highlight his cultural difference from Larreka, and while I still don’t think Anderson has escaped writing the Ishtarians as humans-but-different he’s done a good job making them different. the narrative is engaging and fast-paced, and the human characters are well-drawn, although I could have done without the romance plot (it just felt out of place, forced). I was disappointed we didn’t get to see any human-Ishtarian sex, because it really seemed like that was what it was hinting at for the first two-thirds of the novel. oh, well.
I would, overall, recommend the book, but with these substantial caveats.
moods: dark, horny, reflective, tense