“The Three Cornered Wheel.”
In this first story, Falkayn is a 17 year old apprentice on a ship with
a crew of four. The ship’s power plant
fails and is marooned on a planet whose native inhabitants have a sort of
medieval level of technology and culture.
Luckily, an earlier human expedition left a small base on this planet,
and if the base’s atomic power plant can be moved the thousand kilometers to
the disabled ship, the ship can be repaired and all will be well. Unfortunately, the natives are ruled by a
class of priests who not only fear that the space merchants are a cultural
threat to their theocracy, but have been preaching for centuries that the
circle is sacred, so nothing round or spherical can be made. Even the hafts of the natives’ axes and
spears are octagonal instead of round. If
the space crew tries to build a wheeled wagon to move the nuclear reactor, the
local peasants will massacre them. And
time is running out: humans cannot eat
the food on this planet, so if Falkayn and his comrades don’t get the ship
fixed in a month or so, they will starve.
Falkayn enlists the help of a member of the native knightly
caste, and, after surviving a murder attempt by the stick-in-the-mud priests,
comes up with a wagon design that doesn’t use wheels; Anderson describes the
geometry of this machine in detail but it went way over my head. Meanwhile, the merchant Falkayn is
apprenticed to, who is also a student of intellectual and scientific history,
teaches some young native priests about Keplerian and Newtonian physics, and
the Jewish Kabbalah. These new ideas, he
believes, will, over the course of time, undermine the conservative native
religion and lead to new thinking and thus social, economic and political
progress for the natives.
This story is pretty boring.
The characters are stock, the pacing is bad, the one action scene is
uninteresting, and the long passages describing how to calculate planetary
orbits, the secrets of the Kabbalah, and worst of all the complicated geometry
of the wagon without wheels, are tedious or incomprehensible, and sometimes
both. Anderson also inflicts on us
passages that describe in detail the landscape and fauna but add nothing to the
plot or the atmosphere of the story. I’m
sympathetic to the story’s ideological content, the idea that inflexible
religion can retard progress, but as entertainment or literature, the story is
quite weak. Thumbs down.
“A Sun Invisible.” This
second story is far better than the first.
Falkayn is 20 years old, his apprenticeship behind him, and he is
assigned his own small space ship, and a diplomatic mission representing the
merchant league. Some aliens have built
a fleet of warships and are threatening to take over a sector of space. The technology for the warships, and advice
on how to use them, is being provided by an aggressive group of aristocratic
humans of German descent. These Germans
hate merchants and will drive the merchant league out of the star sector if
they conquer it. Falkayn is to negotiate
with one of these Germans, try to defuse the situation and prevent a costly
war.
The merchant league can put together a war fleet that can
overpower these aggressors, but the alien-German alliance has a big advantage:
their home system is a secret, so in any war they can use all their ships for
offense. If Falkyan can get enough clues
about the invaders’ home system during the negotiations, maybe he can figure
out where it is and, by taking away the alien-German alliance’s advantage,
convince them to call off their invasion.
This is a decent plot, and the characters in this story
(including a non-human merchant Falkayn has to work with and the German
representative, a beautiful woman who has traditional aristocratic disdain for
businesspeople) and the science Anderson includes are far more entertaining and
understandable than the characters and science in the opening story. The action scene, star ships chasing each
other, is also better. So, thumbs up for
“A Sun Invisible.”
“The Trouble Twisters.”
This story is about 100 pages long, as long as the first two tales put
together. Falkayn is now a full Master
Merchant, and working for Nicholas Van Rijn.
He travels in a small ship with a crew of two other merchants, both
nonhuman, his mission to discover and make contact with new planets to trade with. He encounters yet another alien civilization
with a medieval level of technology, and is surprised to learn that these short
and frail sword-wielding natives employ as mercenaries a battalion of humans,
the descendents of the survivors of a ship wreck some 75 years ago. These humans have rebelled against their
native paymaster, and Falkayn has to try to do the right thing for his fellow
humans while at the same time maintaining good relations with the natives, with
whom he wants to begin a lucrative trade relationship.
The plot is good, the non-human characters (including the
ship’s computer) are fun, and the native culture is pretty interesting, so “The
Trouble Twisters” deserves a thumbs up.
I’m happy to recommend The Trouble Twisters; two of the three stories, 75% of the page count, are worthwhile. When I have the opportunity I will read the next book starring David Falkayn, Satan’s World.
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