On My Shelves: To The Stars!

I previously discussed Harry Harrison's Stainless Steel Rat series, and I may later talk about his Deathworld trilogy. Here I'd like to discuss one of his less well-known series, which in some ways I found a more interesting work than either of the others: To The Stars.

 

To The Stars is a trilogy, composed of Homeworld, Wheelworld, and Starworld; despite its title, it isn't concerned with getting people to the stars per se – that is, it isn't one of the many works in which the protagonists are part of the first journey(s) of mankind to other worlds. Instead, this is a story set in a future dystopia in which we have conquered the stars, but also conquered ourselves in an all-too-believable fashion.

 

Jan Kulozik is a rich, successful engineer, part of an upper class of educated, capable people who keep the world running. There are few above him, and a vast number of the "proles" below him, and he's never really doubted that this is the way it should be; the proles he has to work with are hesitant, apparently stupid, with no initiative or drive. If he and his fellows in the educated stratum weren't there, things would fall to chaos.

 

Then, while on a pleasure cruise, Jan's boat is struck without warning by an unlit vessel, throwing him and his current date into the sea – marooned in the middle of the Mediterranean at night, far from shore.

 

And then they are rescued by a submarine – a submarine that claims to be from a country that Jan's histories of the world claim cannot exist, an independent country that calls itself "Israel". The people aboard the ship assure him that their country is real – witness the submarine, which is certainly not of any make Jan is familiar with – and then ask him to keep this secret, warning him that just mentioning their existence could get him in great trouble as well.

 

This is the first crack in Jan Kulozik's certainty, but a fatal one for his peace of mind. Despite his unquestioning prior acceptance, one thing that Jan has always prided himself on is that he is a scientist, a rational man, which means that if he is presented with a fact – the submarine – then theories (the histories and statements about the world) that do not permit the submarine to exist are clearly wrong, at least in part.

 

But Jan almost immediately realizes how dangerous such thoughts are. His brother-in-law, Thurgood-Smythe, who he always had a casually friendly relationship with, is high in Security, and it dawns upon Jan that the fact that Smythe interrogated him after his accident (an interrogation in which Jan lied about what had happened) was, itself, a glimpse as to how dangerous the situation was. Why was Security so interested, if there wasn't anything of interest to Security there in the Mediterranean?

 

Jan considers giving his investigation up; he can go back to his extremely comfortable life with no penalties, secure in his privilege and power. But that would require that he accept a lie over truth, and he can't stomach that.

 

So Jan begins – with the help of a few contacts – to investigate the concealed underbelly of the society that seemed so pristine and simple to him, and slowly begins to understand that the entire world is built on deception, surveillance, propaganda, and oppression – with Jan Kulozik and his people the few benefactors of EarthGov's policies. Despite his upbringing – or perhaps because of the innocence of that upbringing – Jan cannot turn away from this, and chooses to assist the underground that exists.

 

Unfortunately, he discovers that Security – in the person of Thurgood-Smythe – is far better than he imagined. He is tricked, set up and betrayed, with the young woman he had fallen in love with killed during the betrayal; after interrogation, Jan is exiled to a far-distant world where he will be a useful worker… and nothing more.

 

That is, however, only the beginning, the first book – Homeworld. In Wheelworld, Jan has adapted with resignation to his fate, the main engineer keeping systems running on a strange world where human beings can live at one pole during a months-long night, and must flee to the other pole of the world when daylight returns for that hemisphere's summer. When the starships which normally arrive to take the crops the colonists have raised fail to appear on schedule, Jan breaks all traditions to save the grain and bring it with them to the other pole, so that the grain – vital for survival of a dozen worlds – will be waiting when the ships do come.

 

In Starworld, the ships which came are from a revolutionary force, and Jan Kulozik joins them for their desperate strike against Earth itself… a strike which will have to rely on aid from none other than Thurgood-Smythe himself.

 

This was a powerfully-written trilogy from start to finish. Jan has many of the traits of a typical Harrison hero, including a quick tongue and cynical wit, but they are less emphasized here, because Jan – unlike Slippery Jim DiGriz or even Jason DinAlt of the Deathworld series – is not a man who chose to take on the universe on his terms, but rather a man whose circumstances forced him into the role of revolutionary and hero. Jan is not a passive force – he tries his best to take control of events – but he is not able to redirect the course of destiny on his own, unlike some of Harrison's more larger-than-life characters. Jan Kulozik is a far more fallible human; this makes him more understandable, and sometimes both more and less likeable, than the more self-sufficient characters of some of Harrison's other works.

 

The theme of trust and of manipulation – of who you can trust, when, for how long, and of whether anything the person you trust does is really what it seems – is the central thrust of To The Stars, and is personified in the relationship of Jan to Thurgood-Smythe. Thurgood-Smythe at first seems to be a somewhat sympathetic ally, one of the people who might give Jan a chance to survive his discovery; then he turns out to be a monster, purely an agent of Security, willing to do anything for power; and then it appears he's actually been doing this all to get into a position to bring everything down. But he's also arranged things in other areas that make it seem almost as though he's simply been preparing to take power himself even when the Earth government falls. In the end, Jan doesn't even know what Smythe's real purpose is, or was, and chooses to return to his world of exile and a family that is more simple and understandable than the political nightmare his old life became.

 

Jan Kulozik's world is all too frighteningly believable; aside from the starships, it is mostly technology within our grasp, and Harrison extrapolated quite well (if rather cautiously) what technology would be able to do in the realm of computers, transmitters, and such for sensors and, of course, surveillance. I work in this area to some extent, and Harrison's frighteningly capable surveillance state is not only possible – it is, to a considerable degree, already here. The revelations about the NSA's monitoring programs echo, all too strongly, Jan Kulozik's discoveries about the power and extent of Security in his world. The tiny devices capable of storing immense amounts of memory – used by both sides – echo our USB drives, down to the ease with which they can be concealed in seemingly innocuous devices.

 

The trilogy is not without its flaws; there is a wincingly bad sequence set in America, which includes a depiction of a "black" underclass so caricatured at times that it might as well be in blackface, and while there are a couple of fairly strong female characters in the trilogy, women are mostly absent from the major scenes and, as far as I can recall, there's not a chance of this trilogy passing the Bechdel test.

 

Still, this was a very strong entry by Harrison that was quite different from his usual and more popular fare, and I do overall recommend it!