Worlds Enough and Time by Joe Haldeman

"...you have come to me because people are quite reasonably not doing what you want them to do.  You want my skills to subvert them.  For the good of the community, of course."

It's time to finish Joe Haldeman's Worlds trilogy.  I read the first volume, Worlds (1981), back in April, and then volume two, Worlds Apart (1983), early this month.  Today it's the final book, Worlds Enough and Time, published in 1992.  I don't actually own a copy of Worlds Enough and Time, and am taking advantage of a scan of the American hardcover edition that is available at the bounteous internet archive.

As you may remember, near the end of the 21st century, twelve years after a nuclear/biological war destroyed civilization on Earth, the people of the satellite societies orbiting Earth, led by the biggest of these "Worlds," New New York, built a star ship and sent it on a colonization trip to Epsilon Eridani, a trip expected to take between 50 and 100 years.  Aboard is our heroine, Marianne O'Hara.  Marianne, we have been told repeatedly, is some kind of prodigy, bound for great things, and in the early chapters of Worlds Enough and Time we learn that the leaders of the starship effort, for years during its construction and preparation, have been keeping a close eye on her and secretly manipulating things like the hierarchical structure of the project's management in order to clear a path for the genius who is Marianne to be elected chief executive of the ship when the current executive dies.  That executive, it is suddenly discovered, when the starship has only just begun its journey, is sick and will die in weeks!  He takes Marianne under his wing, intent on molding her and guiding her so that she won't pull any political boners on her way up the ladder and so that once she reaches the top she won't use her gifts to do anything radical and thus disastrously upset the ship's fragile little society of ten thousand people.

I have been comparing these Worlds books to the work of Robert A. Heinlein, something Haldeman invites us to do by dedicating Worlds Apart to Heinlein in a way that demonstrates Haldeman's affection for and close knowledge of RAH's fiction.  Heinlein novels are full of mentor figures, and the guy who takes Marianne under his wing is just such a figure, though he doesn't have time to give any long lectures as some of Heinlein's mentors are wont to do.  I suspect this guy, a free market economist who also thinks a ship must be run as a virtual dictatorship and who reveals to Marianne that all the votes taken on the ship are rigged by the elite, is supposed to be an embodiment of Heinlein's own thinking and the tension within RAH's his work.

(As I have said numerous times on this blog, classic science fiction, from Isaac Asimov's Foundation stories to Heinlein's The Moon is a Harsh Mistress to much of the oeuvre of A. E. van Vogt, is always telling us that a secret cabal of superior people acting behind the scenes is in control of society, and often asserts that this is not some intolerable injustice or dreadful menace, but a perfectly good idea.  Haldeman follows this hoary old SF tradition here in Worlds Enough and Time.)

Haldeman spends little time talking about Marianne's rise to power, and even less about her tenure as chief executive--as her mentor had hoped, she does nothing dramatic, and Marianne is fortunate in that none of the numerous disasters that strike the ship occur during her administration.  Instead, as in the earlier volumes, much of the narrative is taken up with the drama of Marianne's family life and sex life in a society in which group marriages are the norm and nobody is expected to remain faithful to his or her spouses.  One such plot thread is about Marianne's daughter.  Selected by the authorities to be a mother, Marianne at first tries to have a baby through implantation in her womb of one of her own frozen ova fertilized by an amalgam of her two husbands' DNA--one of her husbands is a drunk and the other is a hunchbacked cripple, and the medicos are trying to fashion a baby that has neither of those men's genetic weaknesses.  This baby miscarries, however, and on her second try Marianne opts for a test tube baby, a clone genetically identical to her grown in a machine.

It sometimes feels like in these Worlds books that Haldeman is portraying the 20th-century life of Western peoples as a hell of racism and sexism and violence and presenting life in the Worlds and on this starship as an alternative, a paradise of communitarian values guided by an enlightened elite, but every so often he hints that there is a dark side to, or at least a heavy price to pay, for this free-love-no-guns-and-no-money utopia.  When Marianne's little clone is decanted from its artificial womb she is allowed to hold it, but only for the briefest of moments.  Little Sandra instantly starts grabbing and biting at Marianne's breast, but is then taken away from her:

She [Marianne] cleared her throat.  "Could you induce, uh, lactation?  If it was--"

"Physically," [the doctor tells her] "it would be no problem, just some hormones.  But we can't let the infant bond to you.  It would make things difficult in the creche.  It would make things difficult for you."

As the novel proceeds, the creche system starts breaking down and Marianne develops a strong relationship with Sandra--this relationship is probably the most important in the book, and figures prominently in the surreal sense-of-wonder climax of the novel.

Marianne's clone baby is of course only the second duplicate Marianne on the ship--in Worlds Apart she had her brain more or less read into a computer, so that a piece of software simulating her personality at the time just before the starship left Earth orbit lives in the computer.  This second Marianne can learn and evolve almost like a real person, and not only holds conversations with the original flesh and blood Marianne but is privy to all the ship's computer systems and databases, including ubiquitous security cameras and mikes, so it knows everything that happens on the ship.  Haldeman likes to mix up his narrative techniques, and while some parts of Worlds Enough and Time are Marianne's own diaries, much of the novel consists of the stories the computer simulation Marianne tells to people two thousand years after flesh and blood Marianne's death.

Besides the many sexual encounters and tragedies that constitute Marianne's relationships, Haldeman focuses on the technical aspects of running the starship and colonization effort  and the many problems the mission faces.  Morale on the ship is often low, and suicide is rampant; people like Marianne are directed to have children in order to buoy the sagging population.  Many people turn to strange new anti-social religions that make them unproductive citizens.  A year after the ship leaves Earth orbit, religious fanatics back on New New York sabotage that World and transmit to the starship a devastating computer virus that erases many important records, technical manuals needed to operate the ship, and much of Earth's literary heritage.  Then half way through the book, like five or six years after the ship has left Earth orbit, a mutant virus kills all the plants on the ship!  It might be years before the farms can fully recover, and the vats can only produce enough yeast to keep a fraction of the people on the ship fed, so like 75% of them have to go into deep freeze.  Unfortunately, for some technical reason, you have to be in deep freeze at least 45 years.  Oh yeah, and like 20% of people die in deep freeze.  Hey, it's still an experimental process!

These problems don't stop the mission, in part because Marianne's old lover on the post-apocalyptic Earth, Jeff, is building a new civilization, and has finally got a transmitter running that can send info to the starship, though by that point it takes years for a message to travel between Terra and the starship.

After her tenure as chief exec, Marianne, age 55, and her daughter, Sandra (she's like eighteen, I think), themselves go into deep freeze.  When they are roused the ship is only a year away from Epsilon Eridani.  Building a colony on Epsilon 3 is going to take a lot of mechanical skills that few people on the ship have, and a lot of manual labor that few people on the ship are keen on performing.  Back in our solar system, Marianne was the lead administrator on the project that developed that system of reading some people's brains so that their skills and inclinations could be written into the brains of others.  Once awakened, Marianne becomes a leader in manipulating people into being reprogrammed to be eager carpenters or plumbers or tractor mechanics or whatever. 

The last 75 or so pages of the book cover the exploration and colonization of Epsilon 3 during Marianne's lifetime.  Marianne faces more tragedy as her family members get killed, but she also becomes the savior of the human race--all that talk through three books of her high IQ and unique experiences has been leading up to this.  On Epsilon 3 the colonists meet aliens with god-like power--they can teleport anywhere in the universe instantly, they can blow up planets with their minds, they can reprogram our minds.  In fact, it was these jokers who massaged the brains of the leaders of the starship project way back in the beginning so they'd pick Epsilon Eridani as a destination because there wasn't already an intelligent race in the Epsilon system for us to corrupt or murder.

As we've seen in other SF stories, these masters of the universe fear humanity is too violent to join interstellar civilization and put us on trial for our lives.  They give Marianne a test which involves horrendous physical and psychological torture--if she fails the test these entities will exterminate the human race in the Epsilon system and back in the Solar system.  One component of this test, which has the aliens teleporting Marianne to all different planets and even changing the shape of her body into that of a scaly amphibious beast from another world, is making her choose between being tossed into a river of lava or letting them toss Sandra into it.  Luckily for all of us, Marianne passes the test, and luckily for Marianne the aliens pull her out of the lava before she dies and the doctors on Epsilon 3 are able to rebuild her ruined body.  In gratitude, Epsilon 3 is named after Marianne and future generations actually construct a religion around her and her diaries.

Worlds Enough and Time is a good read, even if its themes (religion is a load of crap, aliens put us violent humies on trial, we'd all be better off if scientific experts ran our lives for us) are ones we've seen before.  I like all the technical stuff about life in space and colonizing a new planet.  But I have to say that the second Worlds book, Worlds Apart, is the best.  That book is full of fighting, which is entertaining, and the considerable portion of it that takes place on Earth with Jeff as its protagonist adds variety.  The relationship of Jeff and Marianne is also more affecting than any of Marianne's many other relationships, though the Sandra relationship is pretty good.

The Worlds trilogy is not spectacular, but it is a success.  I'm glad I gave it a whirl.