Agents Watching Over Me

As PDB11 and I had previously read the Children Of The Star trilogy together, and enjoyed it, we decided to read Enchantress from the Stars, which is by the same author, and set in the same universe. 

This is the story of an attempted planetary invasion, and of three people from three very different backgrounds trying to do what they can to stop it: Georyn, an intelligent, brave and genre-savvy young peasant determined to slay the ‘dragon’ that is laying waste to his world; Jarel, one of the invaders, who is increasingly indignant at what his people are doing to the natives, whom they regard as no better than animals; and Elana, a naïve, impulsive student from an advanced civilisation, who stows away to join a mission to protect the locals from the invaders.

I loved this story, though at times I found it emotionally painful, because I could see how important trust was in enabling the characters to learn and develop their abilities: Elana’s trust in her father as he trains her as a covert ops agent; Georyn’s trust in Elana as she teaches him to use magic; and ultimately, even Elana’s decision to trust Jarel when he is one of the guards holding her captive.  It made me realise how untrusting I had been at Elana’s age, and how much this had strangled my development.

Once I’d got over this, one of the things that struck me most was how the characters are so accustomed to keeping secrets that it doesn’t occur to them when they could give a mostly straight answer.  When Georyn sees that Elana has lost the emblem which he believes is the source of her magic power, and assumes that she must have traded it away in exchange for Georyn’s release, she could have explained that she had asked a friend to look after the emblem because the invaders must not find it.  She could even have explained that Jarel is sympathetic to their cause and wants to give Georyn a chance to fight the dragon.

In the examples above, admittedly, Elana may be deliberately making the situation seem bleaker than it is, because Georyn is able to use magic only when motivated by extreme fear.  But when Jarel reflects that people will ask him why he stunned one of his crewmates, and that he will have to pretend to be insane to avoid revealing Elana’s plan, it doesn’t occur to him that he could simply say, ‘That man is a bully and I’d seen him murder natives before, and wasn’t going to let it happen again.’

I found the bittersweet ending more encouraging than Elana herself does.  She worries that it is cruel to let Georyn and Jarel know that there are civilisations more advanced than their own, which they will never enter.  But I think that both men are encouraged by the hope that their worlds will one day advance to true civilisation, even if they personally don’t live to see it, and therefore that there is something worth working towards.  I hope that the story of Georyn’s heroism will be told on Andrecia for a long time.  I also think that Georyn might find that he is still able to work magic, if he is ever again in a situation where he really, really needs it.

As soon as we’d finished Enchantress from the Stars, I decided to read the sequel, The Far Side of Evil, and finished it in a single day.  Older and slightly wiser, Elana graduates as a Federation Anthropological Service agent, and is sent on her first mission.  In view of her past experience, having already worked as a covert ops agent while still a student, she is sent on a solo mission, as an observer of a planet on the brink of nuclear war. 

This is ‘solo’ only in the sense that Elana is expected to work and report independently rather than as part of a team.  There are other Federation agents, including one of Elana’s fellow-graduates, Randil, who is also on his first solo mission.  Like Elana in the first book, Randil has no experience of pre-civilised worlds, is horrified at what he finds and frustrated at not being allowed to help, and is going through much the same, ‘Does no-one except me care about these people?’ phase that Elana had.  Like Elana, he places following his conscience and compassion above the letter of the law.

Unfortunately, there is an important difference: Randil, unlike Elana, does not have enough experience of Service culture to know that he can trust in the Service’s good intentions.  He becomes convinced that the Service is happy to sit back and watch a sapient species destroy themselves, just out of interest, when it would be easy to save them, and that he needs to solve the problem by giving the natives advanced technology.  What could possibly go wrong?

What I found most frustrating about this book was the apparently accepted wisdom, which Elana and Randil and the rest of the Federation seem to share, that civilisations lose interest in war once they turn their energies to colonising space, and that interstellar war is unheard-of.  In view of Elana’s experiences of interplanetary invaders in the first book, whose behaviour could be described as ‘not war’ only because they invade and annihilate people who are unable to fight back, this looks implausible.

Engdahl has said that she regards the invaders in Enchantress from the Stars as a mere space-opera trope, while The Far Side of Evil reflects her real views on space travel – surely, if we made it into space, we wouldn’t tolerate invading inhabited planets?  I don’t think we can take this for granted, any more than we can assume – as Engdahl’s characters do – that all sapient species follow the same developmental path.

Many people today – for example, Mike Berners-Lee in There Is No Planet B – take the opposite view from Engdahl, seeing space travel as a disastrous waste of resources when we need to learn to live sustainably on Earth.  I think both are right.  Eventually, colonies on other planets or in space may be our only insurance against natural disasters (such as asteroid strikes, or the sun going nova) wiping out life on Earth.  But until we have learnt to live sustainably and peaceably on the planet we have, I can’t believe we will be ready to cope with life on a starship or on a colony planet.