The Uller Uprising

I've mentioned H. Beam Piper before. Though he died tragically. he left behind a marvelous corpus of golden-age Science Fiction. One of his stories was "The Uller Uprising." What makes this story interesting is that it is a retelling in space of the Indian Rebellion, better known (to me) as the Sepoy Rebellion.

I have mixed feelings toward the British Raj. I thoroughly approve of the treasonous actions of George Washington, et al., in throwing off the yoke of British Rule. Individual people know how to run their lives much better than some commissar hundreds of miles away. Nevertheless, I think India is better off today than if the Moguls had remained unmolested.

In The Uller Uprising, a bunch of Earthlings are doing what I imagine that the British did in India. They're working with people from another culture, doing commerce, and making money. Since the Earthlings have a more advanced technology, they can pay better wages than the local despots who are into slavery and coercion. The Earthlings do a pretty good job of winning hearts and minds by improving everyone's standard of living.

On the other side, the local despots who see their power eroding have a clear edge in the tradition, and religion side of the hearts and minds equation. The Earthlings maintain cordial relations with the existing feudal lords who are being paid off to go along with continued trade and development. This seems to correspond to what little I know of the Brits in India.

The Uller Uprising predates multiculturalism and its notion that all cultures are morally equivalent. Thus we see abolitionist colonial officials depicted as morally superior to the slave-taking indigenous rulers. The story is written from the colonial government's perspective and by extension it made me feel more sympathetic of the Brits.

After a treacherous betrayal by a coalition of indigenous rulers, the Ullerans go to war and the primary interest of the Earthlings becomes surviving the unpleasantness.

As is usually the case, when two elites compete for supremacy on the battlefield, the non-elite common people do most of the dying.

In the aftermath of the uprising, the Earthlings' relationship with the Ullerans changes from a mostly commercial one to a more authoritarian one with a lot more soldiers and a much heavier hand.

Local rule is fine and all, but a tribal chief is screwing me over is not much different from some British dude screwing me over. And if my tribal chief is illiterate and that British dude is an Oxford grad, the latter will do a better job of  figuring out where to build roads and setting up public institutions.

The trouble with colonial rule is that the British dude will look primarily to his interests and not my interests. Of course, in a feudal society, the nobility's interests are just as divorced from the common people's interests as some foreign dude's. Same goes when the guys calling the shots are members of the "revolutionary people's committee." Meet the new boss, same as the old boss. Some animals are more equal than other animals. And all that.

Though you might think H. Beam Piper is a reprobate colonialist, he does not regard the indigenous alien Ullerans as any less capable than their human counterparts. The aliens manage to start with a roughly Middle Ages level of technological development and in short order figure out how to build nukes. And just for fun, the humans have to scramble to find blueprints for their own bomb--in the pages of a pornographic romance novel.

For these reasons I give The Uller Uprising 5-stars.

Like I said before, I have mixed feelings about the British Raj. My sympathies were as much for the colonials in The Uller Uprising as they were against the colonials in Thunder In The East. My friend from Delhi is adamant that independence--despite the murderous transition of the partition--is a good thing and good riddance to the Brits.

Yet, he plays the bagpipes and enjoys cricket. Maybe it would have been better if India kicked out the Brits when we did.

Or maybe not. Like I said, mixed feelings.

Fuzzy 2.0

In 1964, H. Beam Piper took drop-cloths, laid them out to catch the blood, then blew his brains out. He died thinking himself a failure. He had no job or prospects, his agent wasn't answering his correspondence. He did not know that his agent had died without notifying him that he'd made several sales.

Conversely, John Scalzi is a successful and influential science fiction writer. Mr. Scalzi has taken the characters and the setup of one of Mr. Piper's best novels Little Fuzzy and written his own version of it, a novel Fuzzy Nation.

Though I have been a fan of Mr. Piper's for many years, and have loved several of his novels and short stories, I had skipped over Little Fuzzy. Last week I got a free ebook edition and read it. It was marvelous and shame on me for not reading it years ago. My plan was to read both Mr. Piper's and Mr. Scalzi's books then compare and contrast.

I think that Mr. Scalzi is the better writer of the two. He's taken the elements of Mr. Piper's original work and rearranged them in a pleasing fashion that uses fewer moving parts, and that ramps up more conflict more effectively.

But I liked Mr. Piper's novel a lot more, because I prefer Mr. Piper's future more. I identified with Jack Holloway better as a hermit than as a disbarred lawyer. Mr. Piper's future is dated in places--like when he has film developed--but in other ways it is more advanced with reliable lie detectors and too-cheap-to-meter nuclear energy.

Mr. Scalzi's future is a strange place where people go hundreds of light-years to mine anthracite coal. I suppose if you want to grind an axe against despoiling nature through strip mining, this is one way to do so. But I don't think fossil fuels have the energy density to muscle a starship across interstellar distances. And I don't think a spacefaring civilization will strip mine another planet as cheaply as it can mine what's in the asteroid belt. Don't science fiction writers these days think about science?

Conversely, Mr. Piper's future is one where nobody worries about lung cancer from smoking and hovercars apparently are equipped with Mr. Fusion reactors. And when Jack Holloway shows a fuzzy how to smoke a pipe, it's a courtesy, not a crime.

Mr. Scalzi's lawyers are a lot different from Mr. Piper's lawyers. When the stakes are very high we expect the bad guys to lie cheat and steal, but not the good guys. Mr. Piper's good guys won't perjure themselves, but Mr. Scalzi's do so and we excuse their malfeasance because they're on our side. Conversely, Mr. Piper makes it abundantly clear that the judge won't be on their side, or our side, but on the law's side.

Each novel has a deus ex machina in the climactic court-room scene where fuzzy sapience is decided. Mr. Piper does so with a bunch of space force marines who present surprise evidence. Mr. Scalzi does so with a video camera that she assures the misbehaving corporate types is being watched by daddy who'll spank whoever misbehaves.

What makes me grumpy about Fuzzy Nation is not that Mr. Scalzi wrote a bad book, he wrote a wonderful book. Contrasting the two novels told me more about how the culture has changed in the last half century. And it has not been for the better.