Attribute to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

It is kind of fitting in the dreary doldrums in the prelude to onset of actual Norseman’s Hell while I was mulling about the next issue of the Norseman’s Diaries; that I’ve taken up the subject of H. Beam Piper’s Space Viking. Something that occupied most of my day on Friday and will therefore be much easier to organize into an article in time for the upcoming edition. And this work by Mr Piper contains a lot of good insights on the dangerous instabilities of democratic forms of governance that are probably even more relevant to the present day that when this particular work was written in the early 1960s.

Indeed it was first serialized in Analog Magazine in 1962 and subsequently published by Ace Books in 1963. It begins on the planet Gram—one of the Sword Worlds established as secondary colonizations from the planet Excalibur; an outlaying settlement of the old Terran Federation that has since disintegrated in the fashion of the Roman Empire in the System States Wars that set the stage for many planets falling back into feudal social orders or even lower tech economies in which space travel and most industrial manufacturing are lost altogether.

The planet Gram where the protagonist Lucas Trask , the Baron of Traskon is one of the more advanced and prosperous of the Sword World with a population of about 3 billion and maintains a highly advanced tech level that includes numerous robot servants and FTL ships for interstellar travel. Many of those ships are crewed by men known as Space Vikings who do not dress in the fashion of the Vikings of Old—but go on forays away from home to plunder more primitive planets—especially worlds of the old Terran Federation that are still rich in leftover technology and other resources. This is a practice that Lucas Trask initially deplores as barbaric being that he believes in staying home and investing in productive enterprises and legitimate trade with other worlds. This is the other side of the Sword World cultures that are very much like the Scandinavian kingdoms and feudal systems which at home were like the other countries of Europe in the medieval times. Civilized, lawful and a rather nice place to settle down and raise a family.

Which the Baron Trask was planning to do on his wedding day in the opening chapter where he had just married Elaine Karvall—daughter of a powerful industrialist—which was to be a marriage based on true love as much as it was for convenience—uniting two feudal houses. However the wedded bliss is cut short by the savage attack of Anduray Dunnan from the house of Duke Angus who crashed the wedding earlier in a vain attempt to talk the Lady Elaine into eloping with him. Talk about C-R-A-Z-Y! He returns to gun down the couple as they are leaving the wedding reception—killing the lady and critically injuring Trask before fleeing the scene and the planet altogether by stealing a starship by the name of Enterprise of all things (and a few years before the advent of Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek to boot!) Could that be the source of the inspiration for the name in the renowned TV franchise? I kept thinking about that throughout the story.

Trask spends a lot of time recovering from his injuries both physical and psychological. As his health and stamina improve he becomes fired with the desire to avenge the murder of his wife by pursuing Dunnan to wherever he has fled out in the myriad star systems of the old federation which encompasses a volume of several thousand cubic light years. To do this he sells off his estate to fund the finishing of a partially completed starship which he christens the Nemesis. And becomes a Space Viking—the way of life he used to deplore but in his own words; that Trask died along with his late bride.

After hiring a reliable captain and selecting and training a crew he sets off for the planet Tanith—a primitive world that disintegrated onto preindustrial barbarism during the collapse of the Federation. It had been initially considered by Duke Angus as a prospective support base for a raiding fleet which he gave up on. Trask decides to take it; weighing the possibility that his enemy—Dunnan who is also in the process of organizing a raiding fleet of his own will be interested in doing the same. Upon arrival there—the crew of the Nemesis encounters two ships lurking around the planet which are initially thought to belong to Dunnan but turn out to be run by a duo of incompetent captains who govern their crews by democratic consensus—a methods that the author via his protagonist Trask is extremely critical which is a reoccurring theme throughout story. The ships, Lamia and Space Scourge are run down and poorly equipped and the captains eventually knuckle under and decide to join and defer to the leadership of Trask who then moves to improve the treatment of the local population and upgrade the planet side facilities while upgrading and outfitting the two new ships to make them battle ready and in the process engines to plant the seed of a new civilization on Tanith.

So off the Nemesis and Space Scourge go to raid a few backward planets. First Khepera, Amaterasu and Beowulf—the latter of the three turning out to be a very difficult mission because they have nuclear weapons and some space flight capability to defend themselves with. Typical Space Viking raids are usually initiated with an ultimatum to the rulers of a given planet to order their forces to stand down and allow the raiding fleets to land and gather up resources without resistance—followed by shock and awe tactics of nuclear strikes on cities if there is resistance or the ultimatum is refused. Personally I’m a little put off by the very idea of making a living by plunder and mass murder and Trask still is too—even though he rationalizes at times that most of the worlds his ships raid have despotic and dysfunctional governments. Indeed nearly all forms of government including the feudal systems of the Sword Worlds are deemed dysfunctional to some degree and there is a lot of similarity in the way of checks and balances inherent in a feudal system work to the society of heavily armed ranchers on New Texas in Piper’s renowned work Lone Star Planet!

Over time, Trask who gets promoted to prince and viceroy of Tanith by Angus who has risen to form a kingship back on Gram , continues to build up and improve his planet while sharing some of the loot with the crown back on the home planet of Gram. And he begins to shift away from raiding to obtaining more and more goods through legitimate trade and brokering alliances with other worlds. However relations with the crown on Gram become strained as jealousies develop and King Angus’s regime becomes more corrupt and the society in general as Angus and some of his upper ranking nobles begin to function as plebeian tyrants buying loyalty with wealth transfers. A common byproduct of the resource curse. It gives rise to instability and the likelihood of war between Gram and Tanith. This also becomes a problem with another world where the story eventually comes to its climactic conclusion.

It is the planet Marduk—one of the original federation colony worlds which managed to maintain an uninterrupted civilization even through the tumultuous times of the System State conflicts. It has a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system that is in the process of being usurped by a rising plebeian tyrant by the name of Zasper Makann who is very much an allegory of Adolph Hitler. That scenario begins to unfold in an election year that is ongoing during a sojourn on Marduk after Prince Trask befriends the royal family after rescuing one of their members who was commanding a ship engaged in a battle against the Enterprise when that ship was attacking one of Marduk’s colony worlds. In the battle the Enterprise is destroyed but it is uncertain if Trask’s enemy; Dunnan was on board. Most likely he was not and the more disturbing possibility is that Dunnan is engaged in the systematic attacks to take out Marduk’s colonies and involvement in fomenting political unrest on the main planet aimed at putting the fascist demagogue Makann in power. That in turn becomes a far graver existential threat to the society on Tanith than the trouble back on the former home world; Gram. Trask is wise in his choice of battles to address the problem of Marduk and to let the people of Gram sort out their own problems.

What makes this work worth reading for libertarians and others who value individual freedom is that it embodies Piper’s concept of the Self Reliant Man who knows what has to be done and takes action to make it so. Baron/Prince Lucas Trask who goes on to be king of the world he founded is such a man and he has a strong sense of mercy and justice too—within sensible limits. It also an important virtue of a ruler or head of state to put his society first and not allow enemies to destroy him and his people with their own virtue.

In the portrayal of the political culture on Marduk there are a few important observations to be made concerning internal threats to human societies. H. Beam Piper is obviously no fan of big government or direct democracy. The latter has a notorious reputation as a destroyer of civilizations down through the ages. On Marduk there is much talk about how democracy leads to tyranny and the observation repeated from earlier on in the story that the planets that embraced socialistic policies and sharing wealth in common were the ones that ended up descending into the dark ages and often loosing most of their technology. The most scary aspect of it all was when reading (actually listening because it was an audiobook) the part that took place on Marduk: it sounded too much like America of the present day.

Also hitting a little to close to home is the notion that a lot of people just live off of civilization while contributing nothing to it and just want a free or easy ride while they take it for granted and more or less pick it apart until it unravels and collapses. These non contributors are pretty much the same as the looters and moochers from Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. Another threat are the enemies within—totalitarians who take full advantage of the lawful protections of free speech and association which they will subsequently deny to their political opposition once they are in power. And of course there is also the element of an armed citizenry on the Sword Worlds that is a check on abuses by the landed aristocracy in stark contrast to the government on Marduk which is representative in nature very much like our own—but it claims a monopoly on force which sets it up for the likelihood of violent overthrow by the plebeian tyrant whose followers have stashing arms away like the Hitlerites in the final days of Weimar Germany.

Some readers may find Trask’s opinions on this to be disturbing. Especially his response to the royals that rulers must be willing to kill their own people it they get violent and take to the streets. Least they be killed. It’s essentially what ought to have been done in Germany to nip Hitler and the Nazi party in the bud. At least in the aftermath of the Reichstag Fire. Of course sometimes royalty or feudal lords can abuse their power to the detriment of society. The overriding theme is that there is no form of government that works perfectly and that some forms of check and balances are essential. A constitutional monarchy that upholds due process of the law and private property rights would probably work better than what we have—so long as the royal sovereigns don’t turn into dictators. Or you have a peasant revolt. It’s a matter of top down vs bottom up and either scenario usually results in a lot of death and destruction for naught.

The novel was a very good read and I highly recommend it and a few others I have read since the delay in publication of this journal last week. I just had to go back and read the prequel: The Cosmic Computer; which is set in the time leading to the breakup of the Terran Federation that set the stage for the regression of humanity into an age of neo-feudalism and the rise of the Space Vikings. That story also contains the same themes of civilization in collapse with people living off the accomplishments of the past which they mine like mineral reserves and there are also the phenomenon of the plebeian tyrants and irrational impulses leading civilizations to ruin and heroic struggle of the protagonist to apply ingenuity to adapt to the changing paradigm and keep the hope of civilization alive in the long run much like Lucas Trask works to rebuild civilization in the Space Viking saga.

You can listen to audiobooks of those two and most of H. Beam Piper’s works on YouTube and you still might want to seek out hard copy versions of some of them—as they are nice collectibles for your personal library.

 

You can get H. Beam Piper’s complete “Federation Series” (4 novels, including those mentioned in this review) at Amazon.com for $1.99 by clicking the cover image below:



Such a Deal!