The gulf in character between the superpolished hypermen of Dickson's future and "Private Piltdown' (Dorsai - Gordon Dickson)

Member Name: jdkane

Product:	Dorsai - Gordon Dickson
Date:	19/03/01 (124 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Scene- setting; where have all the normal people gone?; B+

Disadvantages: Science; soft and dubious; C-

Although this, too, is far from new- I did Heinlein because someone brought it up in conversation- it is at least somewhat relevant, first of all because I quoted from it, and secondly because I just got around to thinking about the rather interesting juxtapositions the three volumes of the Dorsai cycle I own find themselves in.

One of the advantages of relying on a stack-them-as-you-buy them shelving system like mine is that, in addition to at least partially freeing you from the curse of anal retentivity, and ensuring that any section reached into at random is as likely as any other to contain something that will satisfy your mood, it can produce interesting and thought- provoking combinations. Naturally, there are people I can't help stacking in a unified manner, but the only ones totally in the same place are Philip K. Dick- a measly twenty- four of his novels, all the short stories, and a biography- Gore Vidal, with one stray, Michael Moorcock with one and a half stacks, one heap for Joseph Heller, Thomas Pynchon and Carl Sagan combined, and Charles M. Schulz in two very large piles of his own. Of course, more often than not there is no ready, unforced point of contact. Mary Gentle's Grunts on top- keeping the pages flat, in other words- of The Secret Pilgrim. Different worlds, which is the wonderful thing.

Of Gordon Dickson's Dorsai series, Tactics of Mistake is resting atop Keith Laumer's posthumous anthology Dangerous Vegetables. Which is itself immediately above a Leninist biography of Mao- Tse Tung. Hmmm. Dorsai itself is next to Alistair Maclean's debut novel H.M.S. Ulysses, with Tom Shields' Diary- a collection of the more absurd or ridiculous passages found on the desk of or actively hunted out by the Herald's columnist- beyond that next to Sun Tzu, and Giovanni Guareschi's Don Camillo stories on the other side of it. Soldier, Ask Not is resting on Patrick O'Brien's Desolation Island, the fifth
Aubrey- Maturin novel. Even more interestingly and more to the point, it has on top of it The General Danced at Dawn and the other two volumes of George McDonald Frazer's stories of life in a Scottish infantry battalion during the breakup of Empire. That is much more to the point, because it was the random thought of wondering how even Donal Graeme himself would have coped with "14687347 Pri'te McAuslansah!' that prompted me to speak more fully on the subject.

Now, the Dorsai saga is about a highly fractionalised vision of the human future, of warring and distinctly specialised human cultures- each clustered around a facet of the human personality, a single group of tasks, if you like. Almost a caste system. Now, that can be castigated as monumentally inefficient and not the kind of thing any culture would resort to if it had all it's wits about it- and how rare a state is that?- but it can't be accused of being unrealistic, because the human race has resorted to caste systems from time to time. It can work, provided you don't want it to work very well- and Dickson knows it, has the Exotics point it out. They are the meditators, the philosophers, the habitues of the long view. They also have a very shady past in a cult of nihilism that, surprisingly, actually grew up. The Dorsai are the warriors. Because of the way the contract system works- each splinter culture survives only by trading skilled personnel with the others, a trade that does, on some particularly centrally controlled worlds, extend to treating people like cattle, and if there is a fault in the universe it is primarily this; how do you treat your skilled professionals like that and get good results out if them? It didn't work east of the Iron Curtain. Anyway, the Dorsai sometimes do find themselves on opposite sides. They are, in a sense, already supermen. The Friendlies- a horribly misnamed pair of worlds, the home of the fanatic element of the human race- t
urn out the cannon fodder. The long term plot and goal is reunification; the blending of these diverse splinters into a much greater coherent whole. Dorsai training is already concerned with stretching the abilities of the normal human beyond the previously possible. Donal Graeme, a descendant of the man who made the Dorsai what they were, is something special even by those standards. Part- Exotic, his abilities, which even he takes some time to understand, lead him into great affairs.

McAuslan, on the other hand, is the real thing. Nine tenths based on a real soldier of the author's acquaintance, the rest on somebody else in the same battalion, he is a perpetually dirty, scruffy, illiterate, barely sentient Glaswegian caveman- but good enough to fight in the North African and Italian campaigns, "and God help the German who got in his way, for I'll bet his bayonet was rusty.' The gulf in character between the superpolished hypermen of Dickson's future and "Private Piltdown' is almost too large for even imagination to bridge. I have to side with McAuslan. Soldiers are not paragons of virtue- or when they are, there is something deeply wrong with your society. Which there is supposed to be, but still...

Dickson is talking about a genuine change in the human character. I would have liked to have seen that brought off by less characteristic means. The connection between ends and means is more complex than he supposes, and the character necessary for the most utterly ruthless means will not be able to turn them to peaceful ends as a rule. He also has a very strange- civilian?- view of war. Almost all high tech weapons are too fragile to use, everyone is a light infantryman. I don't buy it for one second. It follows on very well in a world where skill is the primary determinant of success in a soldier, but it is totally out of step with the current and foreseen trends, technologically and sociomilitarily, in the way fi
ghting units organise themselves. If this is the way things are, the rest follows, but to be forced to swallow such an if casts the rest in doubt.

In a way, it's a shame to have to demark this. The sociology behind it is at least as good as The Stars My Destination , the characters- Dickson's female characters are a weak- sister lot with one honourable exception, Anea would have been better named "Anaemic'- are otherwise intelligent men acting capably in their circumstances. it's just that, in a novel about war and warriors, where war is a crucial tool for changing the fate of the universe- and the ordinary citizens seem remarkably if not totally supine, a Marxist revolution is long overdue- there should have been much more of the dishevelled and farcically disorganised side of war, as well as the cold blooded ferocity of the new way of fighting, like the Gulf- and one or two of those monumental misjudgements that serve as such convenient landmarks in military history, like Kosovo (as of writing) and Somalia. "McAuslan," Frazer says, "Is always with us. He was probably at Cannae and Pharsalia, and hasn't washed since. And you can bet that he'll be there, more or less at attention, with his rusty rifle and his buttons undone, when the ranks fall in for Armageddon." Not in Dickson's army. Which is a flatter, poorer and less inclusive place for it.

Imagination; more follow- through than swing; C
Science; soft and dubious; C-
Scene- setting; where have all the normal people gone?; B+
Characterisation; good in parts, a little four colour touch; B-

Overall; excellent by standards of future history, fails to connect totally with the real thing; C+

Summary: