Twilight World

Another disappointment ... hack work that starts out as something with real promise and then plods into a variant of Heinlein's Rocket Ship Galileo only more puerile if that were possible. It was apparently knocked out in 1961 though this edition has a 1981 copyright attached.

There are two distinct halves that makes it look like a mash-up between two novellas - one with considerable potential and the second not worth reading and which we can summarise as standard rocket to Mars adventure and a Cold War battle with evil post-apocalyptic Soviet-like rivals. Yawn!

This is a shame because the initial core idea is interesting and the writing is often evocative of landscape and character. Anderson postulates that the genetic damage to humanity show more of a nuclear war is far greater to all earthly life than had been envisaged. Mutation becomes normal.

There was a point when I thought I would not be able to put the book down as this idea is developed not only as a story of post-apocalyptic survival but of how a remaining system of governance (a benign military temporary dictatorship) might deal with the problem both practically and ethically.

There appears at one point to be an opportunity for a 'Herrenvolk' to emerge. This is enables a brief and even courageous moral discussion of this option which would still have been touchy only fifteen years after the defeat of the national socialist regime. It is rejected as impractical and wrong.

This could have led to a precursor of Marvel's X-Men series which first appeared in 1963 or, much later, of Darwin's Radio (1999) and Darwin's Children (2002) by Greg Bear but Anderson bottles it. He abandons development for some quick thrills.

The mutant young people might find themselves briefly in a version of the Xavier Institute but their transition is to a simplistic story about building a new world for mutated humanity on Mars. It is crass and poorly thought out. Credible (for 1961) hard genetic science collapses into the incredible.

This is a shame. I can only recommend that you read up to the decision to go to Mars about half way through the book and then just stop unless you like wasting your life as I do on 'completism'. You may get something out of the first half that you will definitely lose in the second.

For Poul Anderson completists this story might have the virtue of being another working out of his frequent obsession with the best forms of governance for human conquest of space. There is a rather touching and well written postscript that 'justifies' his preferred progressive strategy.

His view of earth-based humanity is nevertheless depressingly negative with the attitudes that led to apocalypse leading to the same type of conflict post-apocalypse. One suspects a negative view of the human ability not to resort to violence is in-built somewhere in the American psyche.

The irony of it is that this pessimism is matched to another American trait - a complete inability not to see any other system of human thought as something that can be compromised with to common ends. The 'Siberians' are regarded as simply wrong and so free to be killed.

The 'optimism' in the postscript is essentially based on humanity ceasing to be human as we understand it and to have 'mutated' into something 'better', adapted to new weird environments much as we were supposed to have been mutated from apes. show less