The Great Explosion (1962)

An old favorite, always enjoyable. A little reminiscent of the "Retief" series by Keith Laumer.

400 years after the discovery of a faster-than-light drive causes a mass exodus from Earth, Earth sends out a huge spaceship to begin the process of picking up the pieces and forging them into a new Empire.

But the descendants of the fringe groups that escaped Earth so long ago have other ideas...

A wry and funny book, with Russell's characteristic anti-authority viewpoint. It's a pity that he only created three alternate societies in this book; it's a small gem, and an undisputed SF classic. It also has a warm heart, an essential niceness to it that is all too rare in modern SF. The world and creed of the Gands is likely to stay with you for a long, long time.

Gordon R. Dickson's Dorsai series explored the idea of the varigation of humanity from a biological and spiritual viewpoint. In A Planet Called Treason (later poorly rewritten as simply Treason), Orson Scott Card took the biological angle much further. The remarkable Cordwainer Smith also used similar themes of wild variation among far-flung branches of humanity, although the concept was not central to his work.

Eric Frank Russell didn't take the biological route. The people on distant planets are still quite human in every way. Rather, their culture is different - in the first two cases, a comic exaggeration of an already existing human trait.

It's a lovely book. When you're finished, you'll wish there was more.

Incidentally, the final section was also released separately as a short story "...And Then There Were None". ( )

Bello, divertente, scorrevole *_*

"va giù meglio di un terrestre che cade dal quinto piano" u_u ( )

The title is pure come-on; the explosion referred to is entirely figurative, and anyway, the book isn't about the explosion itself, but about the aftermath - to the extent that in fact I'd remembered the title as 'After the Explosion'. The explosion of Earth's population - and possibly other factors, which I can't now remember, and anyway it doesn't matter, all this is set-up - has resulted in colonies on distant planets, and then in the loss of contact for a considerable period. Now Earth is ready to renew contact with these lost children, and to bring them back into the fold. A mission is sent out, and the book tells of its encounters with a sequence of such settlements (five?).

Like Wasp, this is billed as SF, and uses the backdrop of SF (interstellar travel! distant planets! lost colonies!) and like Wasp, it isn't really interested in these things, other than as enabling the story. Unlike Wasp, it doesn't even pretend that its aliens are anything other than human, and US human, at that - if there is any language problem after the centuries of separation, I have forgotten it. All of the planets are Earthlike - and like those fortunate parts of Earth where cultivation permits people to live in reasonable comfort (fair enough, the premise is that this is why they've been chosen for colonisation, and clearly the colonists had enough choice not to settle for second best).

So the stage is clear for satire. The pompous mother country will be foiled in a variety of ways by independent societies which may have originated as colonies but have outgrown that status thankyou. Moreover, those original settlements wre each set up by a like-minded group - thus far, any parallel to known history holds up - and that like-mindedness has persisted. So there is the colony of nudist health freaks, who won't take seriously any offer made by this collection of white and weedy desk pilots (I paraphrase) and others similar but apparently even less memorable.

The last one, though, is the one I do remember, and I'm not the only one. It's a society of anarchists for whom F=IW: Freedom is 'I won't'. It's a form of anarchism which is closer to frontersman libertarianism than to Kropotkin's mutual aid. The unit of currency is the 'ob' or obligation; nothing could be more painful than to be under an obligation to someone else, and therefore anyone who has the misfortune to incur an obligation tries to work it off as soon as possible. The residents are so self-sufficient that no-one pays any attention to the arrival of a space ship, or has any curiosity about its crew. It's a mean-spirited basis for living, but it is presented as seductive - the Earth ship eventually has to leave before so many of its crew defect that it can't return home.

It was an easy read, if a dispiriting one - and it did help me see what Russell was doing with Wasp.

Not to my taste as a novel. As a book of ideas, as so much science fiction is, it didn't do much more for me. I have libertarian sympathies, but the last chapter is the kind of thing that makes libertarianism seem unserious. 1.28.07 ( )