Subspace Explorers

There is a Brian Aldiss story, ‘Confluence’ - I’ve referenced it a number of times in reviews - which consists of amusing dictionary definitions of words from an alien language. Such as “SHAK ALE MAN: the struggle that takes place in the night between the urge to urinate and the urge to continue sleeping”. And, “YUP PA: a book in which everything is understandable except the author’s purpose in writing it”. Sadly there’s no word that means “a book in which everything is understandable except a person’s reason for reading it”. Which is certainly true when it comes to the works of EE 'Doc' Smith, and most especially Subspace Explorers, published in 1965. It was a reread for me, but I last read it when I was twelve show more or thirteen, and I remembered pretty much nothing of it. Sadly, I cannot go back to that state of blissful ignorance.

Several centuries from now - exactly when is impossible to tell as the world-building is extremely poor - the Earth is split into a WestHem and EastHem: the first is a corrupt democracy controlled by corrupt unions, and the second is a tyranny masquerading as communism. In fact, the entire political set-up of the novel is cobbled together from US knee-jerk right-wing myths: communism evil! unions bad! politicians corrupt! big government bad! monopolistic corporations good! There are also colonies on a number of other worlds, all of which were settled, and are run, by corporations. Spaceships travel through subspace to journey between these worlds and “Tellus” (the Latin name for Earth, which Smith, bizarrely, used in all his fiction).

A spaceship, the Procyon, suffers some sort of catastrophe in subspace. There are only five survivors - the first officer, the astrogator, the daughter of the owner of the biggest oil company in existence and wed to the first officer only hours earlier, her friend who is also the girlfriend of the astrogator, and a scientist who later turns out to be the giantest brain in all of human history. The oil magnate’s daughter is an oil dowser, and the subspace wreck has given her super mind powers, which she then teaches to the other four…

Meanwhile, the nasty old unions in WestHem are trying to break the corporations, who want to automate everything in order to keep down inflation (er, what?). The copper miners threaten to strike, because copper is apparently vital in the future. But the psionic five can dowse for metal, and they find a huge copper deposit on another planet for GalMet, the mining monopoly, also based offworld. The copper miners’ strike fails, so the milk truck drivers go on strike, because centuries in the future milk is once again delivered to people’s homes in bottles and this is so vital to life on Earth that a strike could cause society to collapse… The corporations break the strike using giant-sized battle tanks to deliver the milk (yes, really).

Anyway, the corporations defeat the nasty unions, inadvertently triggering a nuclear war, but never mind, the corporations’ “superdreanought” spaceships manage to destroy the missiles before they cause any important damage. The corporations trigger a WestHem election, but lose it to a coalition of all the political parties - which are all corrupt and evil, of course. But never mind. “Enlightened self-interest”, AKA unregulated corporate operations, will win out eventually. Then the corporations' blockade of Earth Tellus is broken by a mysterious fleet of superdreadnoughts from an unknown planet.

Then it turns out one corporation, previously unmentioned in the novel, has for more than 200 years been running a secret world with a strictly-regimented "feudal" society (it's not feudal, of course, because Smith clearly doesn't know what feudalism is). That’s where the mysterious fleet came from. (The Company Agents are all electrically-charged, and they wear rubber-soled boots, so if anyone touches them - which is just, no, just too fucking stupid for words.) Our hardy heroes, the five from the shipwreck mentioned earlier, with the amazing mind powers, who by now have taught pretty much everyone on the corporation-run planets their amazing mind powers, free the Company serfs on The Company World. But the Company serfs had been infiltrated by agents from a secret world settled by the USSR! And with only five pages to go our hardy heroes defeat them too!

I went into Subspace Explorers with low expectations. It not only failed to meet them, it dug a bottomless pit and then dived into it. Reading the infantile take on politics and economics used by Smith, his hatred of unions and valorisation of unregulated corporations, the implication inflation is more dangerous to a nation than nuclear war, I can only wonder how many of the techbros responsible for the shit state of the world today were influenced by it. We may mock sf and its “Torment Nexus”, but right-leaning politics as understood by a five-year-old such as that described in Smith’s novel, has probably caused more damage. Subspace Explorers is not just bad, it can cause brain damage. Techbros may well name-drop the Culture, but it wouldn’t surprise me to learn Musk, Altman, Andressen, Thiel et al have read and assimilated this novel.

If you ever meet anyone who claims to like Subspace Explorers, back away slowly from them. Then turn around.

And run. show less

Old favorite. I just read Subspace Survivors, the magazine story that triggered this book and its sequel, so of course I had to reread. It starts (like Survivors) with a wrecked starship, then goes off in various interesting directions. Our Heroes (all four of them) are strongly psychic, which lets them do things that heterodyne with the political situation - like find metals in big enough chunks for automation, thereby triggering a near-catastrophic confrontation with the unions. Smith's politics are pretty simplistic, though Labor is not the only villain - greedy and corrupt Capital is equally a problem. But the planets - the colonies from Earth - have solved this with a mathematical solution that puts everyone on the same show more side...except Earth herself, who won't change. The book spends a _lot_ of time on this political stuff; Our Heroes get shoved into the background over and over (then pop up again, with a new twist, mostly psychic). Multiple hidden planets, secret colonies. And one that isn't, which is amusing. There are some really dated bits - the sort of thing that changes unexpectedly. Milk trucks, for one - milk deliveries are a thing of the past now, but when this was written I'm pretty sure they were expected to be a permanent thing (there's a reference - "Milk....Impossible to automate..."). The makeup of the Council is somewhat amusing - Metals, Oil, Communications, the "labor" side...and one Chinese and one Russian representative (though they expect some more to show up). Not Russian business, or Chinese companies, just ethnic Easterners... Again, Smith is showing prejudice and now-dated perceptions. But it was cutting-edge when it was written. And it's still fun, within its limits. show less

One of the early sci-fi writers. At times a crude writing style compared to today's works but entertaining nonetheless. Definitely a product of the cold war.

One of the early sci-fi writers. At times a crude writing style compared to today's works but entertaining nonetheless. Definitely a product of the cold war.