"Then the ancient ape awoke": a review of Poul Anderson's Mirkheim.
From Monday, 7 October through Friday, 11 October, I read Poul Anderson's Mirkheim (NY: Berkley Publishing Corporation, 1977; hardcover; book club edition; 183 pps.). The name of the artist who painted the rather abstract cover is Richard Powers, although his name is not given in this edition.
Mirkheim is the penultimate novel in Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League series, the subject of which is a loose (in this book, nearly non-existent) alliance of inter-stellar merchant princes modeled on those of the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century; whether it is considered the 5th or 6th book of the series depends on which source you accept (it should be noted that Anderson's Wikipedia entry lists the books in somewhat different order than Anderson's publisher did in the 1970s and 1980s). There is a certain amount of overlap between this and the subsequent series in Anderson's "future history," the Terran Empire or Dominic Flandry series; note that Anderson's Wikipedia entry shows that the two series have been reprinted together in omnibus format as The Technic Civilization Saga.
Mirkheim is very much a valedictory lap for Anderson's "globular" (his granddaughter calls him "Gunung Tuan," which is appears to be the name of an Indonesian mountain) trader, the nonpareil gourmand, rough-and-tumble spaceman, devilishly canny bargainer, superhumanly shrewd business executive (his personal fiefdom is the Solar Spice and Liquors Company), backroom political force of nature and Krishnaesque rakehell, the malapropism-spewing, half-Dutch, half-Indonesian Nicholas van Rijn, whose preferred garment is a sarong (which he would doubtless say on him looks "so right"; it's curious that Anderson never had him say that, come to think of it), and his associates: his grandson-in-law David Falkayn, a lesser scion of the nobility of the human-colonized planet Hermes, and Falkayn's extraterrestrial shipmates, the just under a meter long, bloodthirsty feline ("She had once heard herself compared to a cross between an Angora cat, a monkey, a squirrel, and a raccoon, and idly wondered which of these were supposed to be on what side of the family"; p. 25) Chee Lan (as I've previously remarked, I can't help but wonder if she served as a partial inspiration for an X-Men supporting character, Mam'selle Hepzibah of the Starjammers; yes, yes, her name is clearly an homage to the character in Walt Kelly's Pogo strip, but her personality is mostly Chee Lan-derived) and the four-and-a-half-meters-long, over two meters high (p. 26), dracocentauroid from a planet that humans have named Woden, the fierce-looking practicing Buddhist Adzel (and yes, I also see a rough inspiration for Ch'od of the Starjammers in Adzel).
The Earth-based human government and business combine -- referred to as the Commonwealth, the Home Companies, and the Seven (Companies) In Space, respectively -- and the independent merchants operating under the loose collective of the Polesotechnic League find themselves on a collision course with a race of hydrogen-breathing sentients on a subjovian planet that humans have named Babur (humans refer to these beings -- Anderson's preferred term for intelligent beings is "sophonts" -- as Baburites; they're roughly meter-long, four-eyed, lobster-like creatures with "eight short legs," pincer claws and tendrils "extending from the wrists above these....to serve as fingers"; p. 7) over the titular planet that Falkayn christened Mirkheim, owing to the planet's volatility, which produces rare and too expensive to produce artificially supermetals at the higher end of the periodic table. Both the human-centric organizations and the Baburites want primary, if not exclusive, domain over Mirkheim's bounty. The rather convoluted plot involves generations-old socio-political tensions on Hermes, a human agent secretly advising the Baburites and feeding them intelligence about the disunity among the Terrans, and the Home Companies and the Seven pushing the Commonwealth into becoming more of an overtly corporatist -- read fascist -- state, the better that the business combines may pad their own profit margins.
As one might suspect, such a set-up gives Anderson ample -- too ample -- opportunity to have various characters bloviate about libertarian ideals. (Unions come in for a bit of a drubbing, which only serves to underscore how old a work Mirkheim is, given that it was written and published just as unions in America were dropping off of their height of power; one wonders what Anderson made of the rollback of unions in the U.S., beginning under the auspices of Ronald Reagan.) Much like his fellow libertarian Robert A. Heinlein, or the socialist Mack Reynolds, Anderson makes a good case for his philosophy when he can hand-pick his opponents; one hopes that most readers would prefer a libertarian-type government to a fascist-type one, but it must be allowed that science fiction and reactionary tendencies, up to and including fascism, are old friends.
Though Anderson gives hints early in Mirkheim that he would delve into just what sort of interactions a race of oxygen-breathers and a race of hydrogen-breathers could or would have with each other, he largely leaves these questions unplumbed, in favor of mostly dour ruminations on human society, and how the arc of history is warped into a downward spiral for the human race. The book is replete with such dialogues as this:
"'I am not sure anybody will ever grasp why mortals make war,' van Rijn answered somberly. 'Maybe someday we will find a sophont species what is not fallen from grace, and they can tell us.'
"Falkayn addressed the woman [Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen]: 'Well, we can use logic. Successful imperialism does in fact pay off for its leaders, in wealth, power, the sense of glory...yes, and often the sense of duty carried out, destiny fulfilled.'
"'Better we stay with honest greed,' van Rijn remarked."
-- p. 163
Such bull sessions are well and good, and are as much a part of science fiction as BEMs, FTL travel, beamed weapons, and psionic powers; but even a sympathetic-minded reader may find his patience tested by the proliferation of these diagnostics of the human animal in aggregate.
Mirkheim would suffer the most of any of the Polesotechnic League books and stories for being read out of sequence: a reader who first comes to the series via Mirkheim is perhaps not very likely to continue further, which would be a shame; though Mirkheim is one of the driest installments of the series, the pleasures found in most of the earlier installments are to be found here in abundance: van Rijn's verbal filigrees; the bantering and bickering of Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel; the reappearance of other old characters (Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen, from the first novel in the series, War of the Wing-Men, published in an unexpurgated form as The Man Who Counts in the collection The Earth Book of Stormgate; van Rijn's granddaughter Coya Conyon, here married to Falkayn; and reference is made to a bygone associate of Falkayn's, Martin Schuster [p. 148], from "The Three-Cornered Wheel," collected in The Trouble Twisters; it should also be mentioned in passing that two of the stories in The Earth Book of Stormgate should be read between Satan's World and Mirkheim, and after Mirkheim: "Lodestar" and "Day of Burning," respectively); and, as usual, Anderson sprinkles unidentified quotations in his prose to enliven it, from a snippet from Revelations 8:1 (p. 168) to a line from Robinson Jeffers's poem "The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean" (p. 108). For my money, though, the highest pleasure of Mirkheim is to be found in the poker games that Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel "enjoy" with the AI of their ship Muddlin' Through, the inappropriately-named Muddlehead; these scenes are far funnier than any of the officers' poker sessions on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I have zero interest in card games.
Mirkheim's ending is bittersweet and downbeat; just how depressing or morbid you find it will depend on how well you like van Rijn, Falkayn, et al, and how much patience you have for Anderson's socio-political pronouncements. Mirkheim was the last time that Anderson would write these characters; from where I sit, that's a passing that's well deserving of a parting glass. Though there is one further book in the Polesotechnic League series proper -- 1973's The People of the Wind -- it is set generations after the lifetimes of van Rijn and Falkayn, and generations before the birth of Dominic Flandry; as such, it may be more properly considered to be a transitional novel, bridging the two series.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.
Mirkheim is the penultimate novel in Poul Anderson's Polesotechnic League series, the subject of which is a loose (in this book, nearly non-existent) alliance of inter-stellar merchant princes modeled on those of the Dutch Golden Age of the 17th century; whether it is considered the 5th or 6th book of the series depends on which source you accept (it should be noted that Anderson's Wikipedia entry lists the books in somewhat different order than Anderson's publisher did in the 1970s and 1980s). There is a certain amount of overlap between this and the subsequent series in Anderson's "future history," the Terran Empire or Dominic Flandry series; note that Anderson's Wikipedia entry shows that the two series have been reprinted together in omnibus format as The Technic Civilization Saga.
Mirkheim is very much a valedictory lap for Anderson's "globular" (his granddaughter calls him "Gunung Tuan," which is appears to be the name of an Indonesian mountain) trader, the nonpareil gourmand, rough-and-tumble spaceman, devilishly canny bargainer, superhumanly shrewd business executive (his personal fiefdom is the Solar Spice and Liquors Company), backroom political force of nature and Krishnaesque rakehell, the malapropism-spewing, half-Dutch, half-Indonesian Nicholas van Rijn, whose preferred garment is a sarong (which he would doubtless say on him looks "so right"; it's curious that Anderson never had him say that, come to think of it), and his associates: his grandson-in-law David Falkayn, a lesser scion of the nobility of the human-colonized planet Hermes, and Falkayn's extraterrestrial shipmates, the just under a meter long, bloodthirsty feline ("She had once heard herself compared to a cross between an Angora cat, a monkey, a squirrel, and a raccoon, and idly wondered which of these were supposed to be on what side of the family"; p. 25) Chee Lan (as I've previously remarked, I can't help but wonder if she served as a partial inspiration for an X-Men supporting character, Mam'selle Hepzibah of the Starjammers; yes, yes, her name is clearly an homage to the character in Walt Kelly's Pogo strip, but her personality is mostly Chee Lan-derived) and the four-and-a-half-meters-long, over two meters high (p. 26), dracocentauroid from a planet that humans have named Woden, the fierce-looking practicing Buddhist Adzel (and yes, I also see a rough inspiration for Ch'od of the Starjammers in Adzel).
The Earth-based human government and business combine -- referred to as the Commonwealth, the Home Companies, and the Seven (Companies) In Space, respectively -- and the independent merchants operating under the loose collective of the Polesotechnic League find themselves on a collision course with a race of hydrogen-breathing sentients on a subjovian planet that humans have named Babur (humans refer to these beings -- Anderson's preferred term for intelligent beings is "sophonts" -- as Baburites; they're roughly meter-long, four-eyed, lobster-like creatures with "eight short legs," pincer claws and tendrils "extending from the wrists above these....to serve as fingers"; p. 7) over the titular planet that Falkayn christened Mirkheim, owing to the planet's volatility, which produces rare and too expensive to produce artificially supermetals at the higher end of the periodic table. Both the human-centric organizations and the Baburites want primary, if not exclusive, domain over Mirkheim's bounty. The rather convoluted plot involves generations-old socio-political tensions on Hermes, a human agent secretly advising the Baburites and feeding them intelligence about the disunity among the Terrans, and the Home Companies and the Seven pushing the Commonwealth into becoming more of an overtly corporatist -- read fascist -- state, the better that the business combines may pad their own profit margins.
As one might suspect, such a set-up gives Anderson ample -- too ample -- opportunity to have various characters bloviate about libertarian ideals. (Unions come in for a bit of a drubbing, which only serves to underscore how old a work Mirkheim is, given that it was written and published just as unions in America were dropping off of their height of power; one wonders what Anderson made of the rollback of unions in the U.S., beginning under the auspices of Ronald Reagan.) Much like his fellow libertarian Robert A. Heinlein, or the socialist Mack Reynolds, Anderson makes a good case for his philosophy when he can hand-pick his opponents; one hopes that most readers would prefer a libertarian-type government to a fascist-type one, but it must be allowed that science fiction and reactionary tendencies, up to and including fascism, are old friends.
Though Anderson gives hints early in Mirkheim that he would delve into just what sort of interactions a race of oxygen-breathers and a race of hydrogen-breathers could or would have with each other, he largely leaves these questions unplumbed, in favor of mostly dour ruminations on human society, and how the arc of history is warped into a downward spiral for the human race. The book is replete with such dialogues as this:
"'I am not sure anybody will ever grasp why mortals make war,' van Rijn answered somberly. 'Maybe someday we will find a sophont species what is not fallen from grace, and they can tell us.'
"Falkayn addressed the woman [Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen]: 'Well, we can use logic. Successful imperialism does in fact pay off for its leaders, in wealth, power, the sense of glory...yes, and often the sense of duty carried out, destiny fulfilled.'
"'Better we stay with honest greed,' van Rijn remarked."
-- p. 163
Such bull sessions are well and good, and are as much a part of science fiction as BEMs, FTL travel, beamed weapons, and psionic powers; but even a sympathetic-minded reader may find his patience tested by the proliferation of these diagnostics of the human animal in aggregate.
Mirkheim would suffer the most of any of the Polesotechnic League books and stories for being read out of sequence: a reader who first comes to the series via Mirkheim is perhaps not very likely to continue further, which would be a shame; though Mirkheim is one of the driest installments of the series, the pleasures found in most of the earlier installments are to be found here in abundance: van Rijn's verbal filigrees; the bantering and bickering of Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel; the reappearance of other old characters (Sandra Tamarin-Asmundsen, from the first novel in the series, War of the Wing-Men, published in an unexpurgated form as The Man Who Counts in the collection The Earth Book of Stormgate; van Rijn's granddaughter Coya Conyon, here married to Falkayn; and reference is made to a bygone associate of Falkayn's, Martin Schuster [p. 148], from "The Three-Cornered Wheel," collected in The Trouble Twisters; it should also be mentioned in passing that two of the stories in The Earth Book of Stormgate should be read between Satan's World and Mirkheim, and after Mirkheim: "Lodestar" and "Day of Burning," respectively); and, as usual, Anderson sprinkles unidentified quotations in his prose to enliven it, from a snippet from Revelations 8:1 (p. 168) to a line from Robinson Jeffers's poem "The Stars Go Over the Lonely Ocean" (p. 108). For my money, though, the highest pleasure of Mirkheim is to be found in the poker games that Falkayn, Chee Lan and Adzel "enjoy" with the AI of their ship Muddlin' Through, the inappropriately-named Muddlehead; these scenes are far funnier than any of the officers' poker sessions on Star Trek: The Next Generation, and I have zero interest in card games.
Mirkheim's ending is bittersweet and downbeat; just how depressing or morbid you find it will depend on how well you like van Rijn, Falkayn, et al, and how much patience you have for Anderson's socio-political pronouncements. Mirkheim was the last time that Anderson would write these characters; from where I sit, that's a passing that's well deserving of a parting glass. Though there is one further book in the Polesotechnic League series proper -- 1973's The People of the Wind -- it is set generations after the lifetimes of van Rijn and Falkayn, and generations before the birth of Dominic Flandry; as such, it may be more properly considered to be a transitional novel, bridging the two series.
*Cross-posted to LibraryThing.