They Were a Pushover
This is from the Wikipedia article on CITIES IN FLIGHT by James Blish:
They Shall Have Stars (1956) (also published under the title Year 2018!) … is set in the near future (the book begins in 2013).
I assume I am not the only one amused to outlive the speculations of the books I read in my youth, watching the slow but eerie transition between future fiction and alternate history fiction.
But such stories always cheer me up, because usually the predicted future involves a space invasion in the 1980s (UFO), a eugenics war in the 1990s (STAR TREK), or the moon being blown out of orbit in 1999 (SPACE 1999), not to mention creepy murders committed by calm-voiced machine intelligences by 2001 (A SPACE ODYSSEY).
On the downside, no moon base, no cities under the sea, and jetpacks are still expensive toys. And Pluto is no longer a planet! No science fiction writer expected we would lose planets as time went on.
No one, no one, no one aside from Keith Laumer (“Graylorn” April, 1959 Amazing) ever mentioned the possible future where the Soviet Union, far from being the invincible and unconquerable giant, would topple like an empty eggshell.
At that, the comment is only mentioned in passing, The story, like “The Corbomite Maneuver” episode of Star Trek, centers around a confrontation with a gigantic starship which turns out to be not a threatening as it seems. Thanks to the magic of Al Gore’s amazing internet, I can find the exact quote:
“… size along does not mean a thing. It is rather like the bluff the Soviets ran on the rest of the world for a couple of decades back in the war era, just because they sprawled across half the globe. They were a giant, though it was mostly frozen desert. When the showdown came they didn’t have it. They were a pushover.”
It is a testament to the effectiveness of the propaganda spread by newspapers and schools in those days that everyone assumed the only futures open to us were sovietization or thermonuclear annihilation.
I read a lot of science fiction back in the day. This is the sole mention I can call to mind of any speculation that the Soviet Union was a bluff, as fake as the Wizard of Oz. It makes Ronald Reagan’s plan of winning the Cold War by having the bad guys lose seem in hindsight shine with visionary genius.
That only one writer in only one story foresaw this should be a caution to all science fiction writers. Set your stories a zillion years hence, like I do.
No one is going to live long enough to correct me if I have the details about the collision of Andromeda and Milky Way in AD 3,000,000,000 incorrect.
To continue:
In this future, the Soviet Union still exists and the Cold War is still ongoing. As a result, in the West, civil liberties have been eroded more and more, until society eventually resembles the Soviet model. Alaska’s Senator Bliss Wagoner, head of the Joint Congressional Committee on Space Flight, is determined to do something about it.
Scientific research has stagnated, mainly because knowledge has become restricted. … Wagoner concentrates his attention on fringe science theories. … This leads to one of two major discoveries which make interstellar space travel feasible: gravity manipulation (nicknamed the “spindizzy”), which leads to both a faster-than-light travel and effective shielding. Another project yields an “anti-agathic” drug, which stops aging.
Wagoner is eventually convicted of treason by an oppressive regime, but not before he has sent out expeditions (in a later book, it is revealed that they succeed in establishing thriving colonies). Politically, the book clearly expresses a strong opposition to McCarthyism, at its peak during the time of writing.
I remember reading the story in my youth, and cannot quite remember any clearly expressed strong opposition to “McCarthyism” but instead, I recall the fear that civil liberties would have to be curtailed in order to combat soviet agents in our midst.
Of course, the references may have simply sailed over my youthful hence empty head. Can any reader confirm for me whether the Wiki editor is correct?
I believe Mr. Blish passed away before the Fall of the Berlin Wall. But if anti-McCarthyism were something he, or any author, used his story telling skills to promote in public, it would be embarrassing to outlive the release of Soviet archives, and discover his folly.
We now know, even if it is hidden from schoolboys, that everyone accused by McCarthy of being a Soviet Agent, was, in fact, a Soviet Agent.
If the Wiki editor is correct, and this was a theme of the tale, then — alas! — Sad how badly this is dated!
But, like the fact that we escaped having the moon blown out of orbit in 1999, it is happy that the events we thought we were suffering, an evil witchhunt led by a power mad senator, turned out, in retrospect, to be the honest efforts of a patriot grossly misrepresented by the leftwing press.
The summary continues:
… the Cold War ended with the peaceful merging of the East and West blocks into a single, planet-wide Soviet-ruled dictatorship, which hardly made any perceptible change, as the West’s political system had already become virtually identical with the Soviet one.
However, this dictatorial power was broken by the spindizzy drive which works for very large objects, so that dissidents and malcontents have an easy way of escaping and going off into space.
First factories, then eventually whole cities migrate from the economically depressed Earth in search of work
It is possible that I am confusing the memory with a parallel theme remembered from the CoDominium future history of Jerry Pournelle, but I thought the point was that a crowded planet filled with nukes and commies was no good place for Yankee independence to flourish, and so it was better just to pick up Scranton, Pennsylvania, or Manhattan, New York, and make like the Mayflower, looking for better prospects elsewhere.
I do not recall Pournelle’s point with the CoDominium stories being that McCarthy was bad for trying to protect us from the Soviets and their agents among the State Department, but that cruel necessity would necessarily curtail the blessings of liberty.
It is a cynical and sobering idea, but hardly a call for embracing communism, or for undermining anticommunists.
The James Blish stories were called Okie stories, because the flying cities had a fate parallel to the farmers forced to flee from the Oklahoma Dustbowl, migrant workers seeking labor elsewhere.
Maybe I misunderstood the point of the Okie Stories, but I thought the idea was that a world run by commies would be poor as dirt, and cause economic depressions.
At least, that is what my dim memory recalls from decades gone by. I wish one could trust the Wikipedia editors, so that I would not have to rely on such uncertainty.
Or, of course, I could reread them before typing up a column, so as to avoid the risk of sounding like a windbag — but what fun is there in that?
About John C Wright
John C. Wright is a practicing philosopher, a retired attorney, newspaperman, and newspaper editor, and a published author of science fiction. Once a Houyhnhnm, he was expelled from the august ranks of purely rational beings when he fell in love; but retains an honorary title.
