From Free Life, Issue 19, November 1993
ISSN: 0260 5112

Enemies of the System was first recommended to me by Chris Tame. Anthony Burgess's favourable review in The Observer was a further incentive to read it. It is an interesting story, set in a world where Homo sapiens has been replaced, thanks to a million years of genetic engineering, with Homo uniformis, Man Alike Throughout. The New Communist Man has been created, and gone are the savage old ways of war, disease, ritual and emotion. On the planet of Lysenka II, "the last refuge of capitalism", things are very different from this utopian system, however. The inhabitants of Lysenka II are the primitive descendants of unreconstructed Homo sapiens. And when a group of the System's elite holidaying on Lysenka II find themselves stranded in the wilderness, the proximity of their strange and wild ancestors becomes a terrifying threat to their loyalty and survival.

The System of the title is an Orwellian empire which has taken communism to the stars. As in George Orwell's 1984, we are confronted with the abolition of history. The story conveys, through its characters' anxious confrontations with their ancestors, a deep sense of what has been lost in the pursuit of Procrustean socialism:

"We are logical, and we understand the logic of controlling everything, from ourselves to the whole Solar System. Yet, apart from abolishing many sapiens features of life, like womb- birth and family and art and religion, what have we done? Nothing".

One of the best aspects of the novel is the analytical account of the System itself. What I find inconceivable about most "galactic empire" science fiction, from Flash Gordon to Star Wars, is that tyrannies, centralising decision-making and stifling the free flow of information, could ever maintain the organisation to span galaxies. If, however, the knowledge problem could be solved by super-computers, and if humans could be reduced to sophisticated automatons, then perhaps Hayekian doubts could be put at rest. We are told that the human mind would be incapable of the mathematics on which much of the System's technology depends. Mr Aldiss thus solves the apparent paradox of the System, at once inquisitorial and draconian, yet fabulously wealthy and technologically advanced.

Mr Aldiss is not fully convinced by his own model, however, since he also seems to believe that such an attempt to reduce the human race to so many cogs in the machine will prove ultimately unworkable. He suggests that Homo uniformis, for all his ability, would have been outperformed by his more unruly ancestor. What he fails to explain though, is why the inhabitants of Lysenka II, free from the clutches of the System, have remained little more than barbarians. He suggests that the barren planet has held them back, but given a million years I would have expected better from "the last refuge of capitalism".

By the same token, I find the gradual transformation of the story's protagonists into enemies of the System also unconvincing. A million years of genetic engineering ought to be enough to eliminate any dissident sentiments. Nonetheless, Brian Aldiss's pessimistic story is well worth reading.

Ira Levin's This Perfect Day will already have come to the attention of many libertarian readers. Levin was an early disciple of Ayn Rand, and has produced a string of best-selling horror stories, including A Kiss Before Dying, Rosemary's Baby, The Boys from Brazil, and The Stepford Wives. In This Perfect Day, individualists struggle against a future society where the major collectivist creeds, including, incidentally, an atheistical variant of Christianity, have merged. All individuality is suppressed. Mr Levin's hero, Chip, for example, is made to feel uneasy as a child, for having one green eye. Monopolistic state ownership is used as a means of suppressing individuality; an aspiring artist is denied paper and crayons, for instance. The machinery of government consists of an enormous computer known as Uni, a sort of electronic Big Brother. Under Uni's guidance, sex is programmed weekly, monthly treatments keep people docile, and everyone is scheduled to die at the age of sixty two.

Overt coercion has been abolished in Mr Levin's world, but that world is not one with which libertarians will sympathise. As power theorists have always pointed out, the greatest power consists in covert coercion, that is being able to rule without resort to physical force. Uni, like Aldous Huxley's World State, manages just that sort of control. The protagonists of this story have managed to avoid their treatments, and it is with their unorthodox ideas that Chip eventually comes into contact:

This Perfect Day was acknowledged by J. Neil Schulman as a major source of his ideas for The Rainbow Cadenza. It suffers from some of the contradictions which Mr Aldiss's book resolves, in that it posits a society which, dulled and normalised by a totalitarian state, has somehow managed to colonise the Solar System and make great leaps forward in other ways. Nonetheless, it is a superb and satisying story, and the adventures of those trying to destroy Uni make for exciting reading.

Gene Wolfe has made his mark today as a 'New Wave' writer, the New Wave genre not being known for its libertarian leanings. Operation ARES, however, is something of an undiscovered libertarian gem. It is set in a United States which has for two decades been slipping into a primitive past, discarding the Constitution and the rule of law, turning its back on technology, and abandoning its Martian colony. Its "emergency" government, an unpleasant police þum welfare state, has preserved itself for twenty years by disarming the populace, printing money as fast as it can, and maintaining a dependency culture. But now the abandoned Martian colonists have returned, and under the auspices of ARES, the American Reunification Enactment Society, they plan to overthrow the "Pro Tem" Government, as it is called. Among the stated aims of ARES are the restoration of the Constitution, an end to harassment of the scientific community, restoration of the right to bear arms, a dismantling of the welfare state, and a return to hard currency.

All this makes a refreshing read in our age of ecomania. Mr Wolfe offers an uncompromising defence of science and technology. He is acutely alive to the atavistic threat posed by the back-to- nature cults, and his depiction of killer packs of wild animals in modern day America highlights the dangers which unbridled nature would bring down (and have brought down) upon mankind. He is also very much an opponent of the welfare state - he regards welfarism as the politics of bribery - and an opponent of social engineering, if one is to judge from his hero's accusations of the Pro Tem Government:

"You've taken everyone who in desperation has accepted a handout of your yellow money and hung a tag around their necks that made them The Poor - someone to be experimented with by your sociologists and bossed and spied on by anyone who can read and write and is willing to take that dirty job."

While one supports the fight against the PTG, one feels less sure about the role of the "Martians" in the war. It seems the sole reason for the Martians' return to earth is to install a regime more favourable to the space race, off which they can leech, having been left by the Pro Tem Government to fend for themselves. It is not obvious why Mr Wolfe wants to compromise his moral message in this way. Operation ARES suffers from an unnecessary dollop of power politics of this sort, which would be more suited to a spy novel. Overall it is not as exciting as either the Aldiss or the Levin story - the PTG is simply not very frightening - but this will not stop most libertarians from sympathising with Operation ARES itself.

Matthew O'Keeffe