|
| Cover art from a painting by Enric 3 |
Film This!
|
|
| Cover art from a painting by Enric 3 |
| SOLDIER, ASK NOT Gordon R. Dickson New York: Ace Books, March 1980 |
Rating: 4.5 High |
|||
| ISBN-13 978-0-441-77417-3 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-441-77417-2 | 313pp. | SC | $1.95 | |
When young Tam Olyn lost his parents to an accident, he and his sister Eileen went to live with Uncle Mathias Olyn: a cold and aloof man who, according to Tam, inspired in both of them a bone-deep distaste.1
"For it had been Mathias, my father's brother, who had taken us in, Eileen and me, two orphan children after the death of our parents in an air-car crash. And it was he who had broken us during our growing years that followed. Not that he ever laid a finger on us physically. Not that he he had been guilty of any overt or deliberate cruelty. He did not have to be." "He had only to give us the richest of homes, the choicest of food, clothing, and care—and make sure that we shared it all with him, whose heart was as sunless as his own great, unpierced block of a house, sunless as a cave below the earth's surface that has never felt the daylight, and whose soul was as cold as a stone within that cave." – Page 7 |
Tam, as a result, grew into a coldness of his own, a desire to escape the domination of elders, to be the master of his fate. With his sterling academic record, he applied to the Interstellar News Guild and won probationary status. Not as freeing as full membership, it would still give him the right to travel among the several human worlds of the galaxy on assignment. And when Eileen took him to the Outbond enclave in St. Louis to see the site where the Final Encyclopedia was being constructed, the attempt by Mark Torre, the aging head of the project, to recruit him as successor led to Tam having an experience that gave him the ability to fulfill that dream.
He operated in a universe where humanity had settled sixteen worlds. Evolutionary pressures had led the race to "splinter": the various facets of human nature2 each developed to an unprecedented peak on some world or set of worlds. Thus, the Dorsai worlds bred warriors par excellence; on Mara and Kultis dwelt the Exotics, who had raised psychology to something like magic; Newton and Cassida were worlds where the hard sciences reigned supreme; and the Friendly worlds were the home of ardent religious faith and fanaticism.
He traveled to the world of Newton to cover the civil war then under way. In the course of it, he was wounded in the leg — but also in the spirit, for he saw his best efforts at helping his sister and her husband wiped out by a madman. He became a madman himself as a result: feeling now totally bereft of love, he was driven by a thirst for revenge; his only desire was to wreak havoc on the Friendly forces that had crushed his dream. With his ability to foresee likely outcomes and manipulate people toward those ends, he had some success; he maneuvered the opposing forces on St. Marie into a relatively bloodless defeat for the Friendlies, expecting this would be the opening act of their eradication.
But Padma the Exotic shows him afterward that his success was an illusion, that in fact his entire crusade was misguided. Tam Olyn has an apparent change of heart, but we are left to wonder how deep his transformation goes.
This is a gripping novel and a vital part of the Childe Cycle, Dickson's magnum opus, an unfinished series of novels dealing with the tension between the drive for progress and conservatism. Soldier, Ask Not was expanded from a short story of the same name which won a hugo in 1965. As a novel, it has some shortcomings. The chief one is that it ends rather abruptly, with Tam's objections to Padma's argument uncharacteristically weak, his return to the progressive side4 uncertain and his future relationship to his sister undetermined. It stands fairly well alone, but is better when read in sequence with the other existing novels in the Cycle. I'll give it a 4.5.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.