Short Story Review: Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)

/ Joachim Boaz

This is the 20th post in my series of vintage generation ship short fiction reviews. You are welcome to read and discuss along with me as I explore humanity’s visions of generational voyage. And thanks go out to all who have joined already. I also have compiled an extensive index of generation ship SF if you wish to track down my earlier reviews on the topic and any that you might want to read on your own.

Previously: Fred Saberhagen’s “Birthdays” (1976)

Next Up: George Hay’s Flight of the “Hesper” (1952)

  • Uncredited cover for Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953)

3.25/5 (Above Average)

Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953) first appeared in Cosmos Science Fiction and Fantasy Magazine, ed. L. B. Cole (September 1953). You can read it online here.

Anderson’s tale is a fascinating collision of two of my recurring interests in post-WWII science fiction: generation ships and organized labor. Due to my love of Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost” (2002) and Brian W. Aldiss’ Non-Stop (variant title: Starship) (1959), I started a review series on generation ship short fiction in 2019. The series has languished recently as I am running out of pre-1985 depictions of the theme available in English to read. I read Anderson’s vision last year but could not muster a review. However, my recent focus on organized labor caused me to reread Anderson’s account of generational conflict, the working class experience, and the contours of power and government.

“The Troublemakers” ruminates on the type of society that should exist in the intermediary generations between departure and arrival. Some authors speculate that stasis (often achieved via religion or indoctrinating ritual) or decadence (the loss of knowledge about the voyage) would set in the generations after departure from Earth. Anderson, on the other hand, examines the role of deliberate instability to combat stasis and decadence in the grand colonizing scheme. Recommended for diehard fans of the history of generation ship stories (me!) or Poul Anderson completists.

The Nature of the Voyage

The Pioneer, a vast generation ship six miles long and two miles wide, replete with massive parks, hydroponics bays, and entertainment facilities sets off from Earth to Centauri. Only partially constructed in order to give the crew something to do for the first generation, the original crew of 200 hundred men and women is planned to rise to 10k by the time of arrival.1

The story follows the youthful Ensign Evan Friday, a rising officer in the Astrogation caste (“the aristocracy of the aristocracy”), who starts to wonder about the corrupt nature of his world: “Eighty years later, what do we have? An unending succession of tyrannies, revolutions, tensions, hatreds, corruptions—all the social evils which Earth so painfully overcome, reborn between the stars” (3). He’s accused by the Captain and his Council, a representative from each of the major factions, on the “flimsiest tissue of fabrications” (3) of gross misconduct and is stripped of “all title, honor, and privilege” (4). Instead of execution, he’s assigned a common crewman position with the Engineering section (4). He must put aside his snooty elitism and learn to excel in the world of the common laborer. Friday, who yearns for a ship refocused on the grandeur of its mission and cured of its corruption, slowly rises up from the bottom. He befriends fellow workers. He attends union meetings. He watches the demagoguery of the union representative Wilson. He sees how power functions from another perspective.

Eventually, as tensions threaten to explode between different groups, Evan falls in with the rising correlate of the American middle class–small-scale artisans and business owners–who begin to organize their own Guilds. With Evan’s leadership, the Guilds start to flex their muscles and angle for their voice to be heard. And eventually Evan must learn the true shape of things.

Final Thoughts

Due to rise of fascism abroad in the intra-war period, there was a resurgence of interest among psychologists in the validity of crowd psychology.2 In this formulation, the public manifests an opinion that is a “latent disease state, subject to turbulent infection at unpredictable moments.”3 Far from a uniquely foreign occurrence, psychologists on the Homefront identified similarly troubling tendencies.4 Fearful of similar unrest at home, psychologists in the post-WWII moment positioned themselves as the experts needed design “democratic personalities and predict emotional surges in national and international tension.”5 In short, psychologists defended social engineering.

I bring this historical context up as the final conclusion of “The Troublemakers” (1953) directly echoes this sense that psychologists are the guarantees of a more socially progressive and stable future–socially engineering must occur. Anderson’s suspicion of traditional societal organizing institutions and concepts–unions, guilds, class, etc.6–echoes 50s views on the growing centrality of the expert in informing policy. Anderson deliberately ignores mentioning institutional religion. Instead, the idealism of the frontier liminal space that must be conquered takes on an almost religious imperative and forms the ideological thrust of the story. After World War II, psychologists saw themselves as guiding America towards a more democratic future. In parallel, psychologists in Anderson’s story socially engineer a system to contain and encourage particular types of behaviors that will culminate in a generation suitable to colonize.

In addition, Anderson’s take on unions echoes some strands of contemporary 50s criticism. As I’ve discussed at length previously and reproduce here in broad strokes, during the Great Depression there was broad consensus among leftist thinkers that the labor movement would lead to radical change. The Second World War and the economic recovery shattered that consensus.7 They struggled to grapple with an economic system they had expected to collapse and the lack of interest in socialism within American unions. Within unions, the political and social transformation of capitalism became secondary to preserving their organizations and maintaining a harmonious relationship with industry.8 On the right, American corporate powers and their conservative congressional allies unleashed a “propaganda campaign” against the labor movement.9

Where does Poul Anderson fit into this political scenario? Unlike H. Beam Piper’s “Day of the Moron” (1951), Anderson’s story isn’t reactionary or alarmist in a visceral sense despite his critical take on unions. He describes unions (in the story they organize lower class workers) and guilds (described as more middle-class) as an important means to protect against monopolistic oppression. However, unions leaders like Wilson–characterized with crass physical cliches like obesity to indicate his corruption–utilize demagoguery to control the masses. Evan Friday’s coming-of-age sojourn amongst the lower classes does cause him to see Wilson’s manipulation and dismiss the Communist views of many union members. The radical potential of unions will simply lead to more cycles of oppression under a Stalinist dictatorship. Unions might have immediate value in their desire to protect the worker from oppression or advocate for a previously ignored voice but the expert psychologist must channel policy to heal the larger population. Friday leaves with a deep appreciation of the working-class struggle. Anderson positions him as an empathetic leader who will defer to the intellectual elite.

As a literary experience, I’m not convinced of the merit of “The Troublemakers” (1951). As a means to extrapolate from contemporary 50s politics within the distilled world of a generation ship, Anderson provides a fascinating range of political ruminations that ultimately demonstrate his deep distrust of “large, encompassing systems,”10 belief in the dangerous potential of crowd psychology, and skepticism that there is a true political system.11 Anderson conjures a version of a sociological view popularized in 1956 by C. Wright Mills that a “power elite”–a web of industrial, military, and corporate interests–dictates from behind the scenes. Unlike Mills, as long as the power elite are guided by experts who will make sure humans can conquer the new frontier (and minimize human casualties), he’s okay with it.

Notes

  1. I found this detail–partial construction–fascinating. While not discussed in detail, the implication is that the crew could complete large sections of the interior to suit their interests and needs over the generations. This gives the opportunity for a laboring class to be firmly entrenched in the ship. ↩︎
  2. See Ch. 3, “The Dilemmas of Democratic Morale” of Ellen Herman’s brilliant The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (1995), 48-81. ↩︎
  3. Herman, 55. ↩︎
  4. Herman examines numerous psychological studies of the US military. ↩︎
  5. Herman, 81. ↩︎
  6. There’s substantial scholarship on the image of the American West transposed into the future. For example, Carl Abbott’s Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West (2006), which does not mention Anderson’s story. Anderson’s story is a bog standard, but illuminative, example. If you’re interested in revisionist takes on the West in SF that would enrich Abbott’s take substantially, check out Craig Strete’s corpus of works typified by “When They Find You” (1977) and William Tenn’s “Eastward Ho!” (1958). ↩︎
  7. Jeffrey W. Coker’s Confronting American Labor: The New Left Dilemma (2002), 51. ↩︎
  8. See Ch. 19, “Retrenchment, Cold War, and Consolidation, 1946-1955,” of Melvyn Dubofsky and Joseph A. McCartin’s Labor in America: A History, 9th edition (2017), 303-320. ↩︎
  9. See Elizabeth A. Fones-Wolf’s Selling Free Enterprise: The Business Assault on Labor and Liberalism, 1945-1960 (1994). She describes both a local and a national campaign. ↩︎
  10. See Anderson’s obituary for a brief discussion of his politics. ↩︎
  11. For more on his politics, check out this interesting article. ↩︎

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27 thoughts on “Short Story Review: Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers” (1953)”

  3. Great piece. In transit generation ships are always fertile ground for stories. This is an Anderson novella I’d never heard of—it predates my getting into SF (around 1954) and Cosmos is a pretty obscure magazine although…

    HOLD THE PHONE! I HAVE THIS ISSUE!!!!!! (which means I probably *did* read it, 15 years ago)

    You didn’t rate it too highly, which makes me hesitate to try it out, but your verbiage ON it was interesting. 🙂

    Reply

    • Thank you. It certainly isn’t one of Anderson’s best or most focused stories but the topic and context fascinates me. But, for fans of generation ships, it seems like Anderson is attempting to make a meta-commentary on other generationship stories (like Heinlein and Aldiss) that speculate generations of decadence and decay will occur. He then posits a way to defeat decadence and decay, introduce political instability under the guidance of “experts.”

      Reply

      • “Question and Answer” is about a mission to determine why a previous survey mission to an extraterrestrial world did not come back (it was also published under the title “Planet of No Return” and was originally going to be part of a “Twayne Triple” with Asimov’s “Sucker Bait” and another story). It’s got “psychomed” officers embedded as part of survey missions and they don’t come off well (no spoilers).

        Reply

  7. Meanwhile, and a bit more on topic than my Clarke query, I wonder if you’ve ever seen any of Adam Curtis’ films ? If not, and on reading “Final Thoughts”, I think you’d find pretty much any of them interesting, but in particular I’d recommend his series tied to Freud and Eddie Bernays, “The Century of the Self” https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0432232/

    All Curtis’ preoccupations surface somewhere therein, including the role of psychiatry at the end of WW2, the part played by propaganda in a democracy, the need for the exercise of power and its dangers, etc etc.

    Reply

  8. Hi Joachim, I hadn’t read Troublemakers, thanks for the distraction. Troublemakers is a re-framing of Heinlein’s Universe. More or less the same ship, altered timeframe to a point just prior to the mutiny and asks how to best manage the eventuality.

    Both ships are very large (6mi x 2mi vs 5mi x 2000′) and rotate to simulate gravity; both describe multideck/gangway/shaft movement within the ship, with ship areas like farms, engineering, and “villages”, etc.; both present social hierarchy mapped to fore-aft/outer-inner levels. (I can’t put hands on my copy of Aldiss’ Non-Stop to confirm… I recall it also had the forward-aft [social] divide. I think that ship [name?] used Star Trek gravity, not centripetal. Also, better overall story; not sure Aldiss was re-running the ‘experiment’ per se).

    Swap Heinlein’s loincloths, Margaret Mead-ish cargo-cult-ish patriarchy and general fall from civilization, and ‘lower-deck’ Muties, for Anderson’s planned social history and a mutinous labour force.

    Anderson’s managed-history gives me Asimov psychohistory vibes. Just a hint.

    On a final note I’m struck by how similar Troublemakers is to the Silo tv series (Wool, etc, which I haven’t read); exchanging ships for sealed underground bunkers, with managed social history featuring a mutinous crew in the lower levels. A lot of ground between Troublemakers and Wool; not entered as evidence or example or accusation, but it’s a straight line between the two.

    Reply

    • Yes, I briefly mentioned the Heinlein connection in the comments and brought them up in many other posts in this multi-year series. As I read Heinlein and Aldiss’ take in my early 20s, the specifics have become a bit fuzzy. I’ve reviewed both Orphans and Non-stop early on in the history of my site. General index: https://sciencefictionruminations.com/science-fiction-book-reviews-by-author/

      As for the connection to Silo, generationships do embody that classic conceptual breakthrough plot that comes up again and again. Another story along those lines that I did include in this series that is NOT on generation ship but is an explicit commentary on the trope is Michael Coney’s “The Mind Prison” (1971). From my review:

      “Coney positions “The Mind Prison”, in the introduction to his collection Monitor Found in Orbit, as a commentary on generation ship stories–in particular Robert A. Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (serialized 1941) and Brian W. Aldiss’ Non-Stop (variant title: Starship) (1959) which he read and reread over the years. He writes: “I cannot explain why I find the closed environment story so fascinating [..] Why should an adventure story be more exciting, merely because the people therein are not subject to external influences?” (114). Coney emphasizes the centrality of male heroism in many of these stories: “I would rather think that these stories emphasize identification, since the hero is invariably the only normal person around, surrounded by nonsensical religions, illogical facts, widely held misconception, which only he [emphasis Coney’s] can see the stupidity of” (114). “The Mind Prison” explores an enclosed environment remarkably similar to a generation ship, with a female heroine.”

      Compare of course to Priest’s utterly brilliant The Inverted World (1974), in an enclosed “city” migrating across Earth, in which the main character is about to have that conceptual breakthrough but refuses to acknowledge its veracity. I see Priest’s story as a deliberate rebuttal of the standard gen ship premise.

      Reply

  9. I read “The Troublemakers” in that issue of Cosmos (not when it first came out!) and reviewed it as follows:

    “”The Troublemakers” is a generation ship story. The hero is part of the aristocracy of the ship — one of the hereditary Astrogators. But as the story opens, he is convicted of a crime he didn’t commit, but might have — rabble-rousing against the unfair treatment of the lower classes. His punishment is reduction in rank to the lower classes — where he quickly establishes himself as a good worker, begins to advance, becomes involved to some extent with their revolutionary movement, becomes close friends with the guy who beat him up his first day there, etc. etc. But the corrupt Union boss drives him to a third group, the petty bourgeois — and soon he is in the midst of a real riot perhaps leading to revolution. But what does all this have to do with getting to Alpha Centauri? The resolution is the sort of twist that would have just shocked and thrilled me at age 13, but which was a bit too easy to see coming at age 45. And indeed the story is a bit tendentious. One interesting recent story that seems to me to be commenting on it is Ursula Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost”. Not by any means Anderson at his best, but readable stuff.”

    I compared J. T. McIntosh’s short novel 200 Years to Christmas to “The Troublemakers”. (“200 Years to Christmas originally appeared in Science Fantasy #25, in 1959, probably in the same form (i.e. I doubt the Ace Double is expanded). It’s a generation ship story, focussing on the problem of societal cohesion on a generation ship, as such reminiscent of Poul Anderson’s “The Troublemakers”, Ursula Le Guin’s “Paradises Lost”, and Stephen Baxter’s “Mayflower II”, among many others.”)

    Reply

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