Soldier, Ask Not – Gordon R. Dickson

Ace, printed 1982, copyright 1967, 313 pages

ISBN: 0-441-77419-9

Read January 2013, at age 34

First time read

What it is:

One of the books of the Childe Cycle – I read it third, but it seems like there’s debate as to the proper reading order.  As with the other two (Dorsai! and Necromancer), it’s far-future idea-based SF.

From the back cover:

On fourteen worlds, Man was no longer wholly Man.  On the Dorsai, He was Warrior, and indomitable mercenary born and bred to battle, a pure evocation of the martial spirit.  On Newton He had become the Scientist, all but lost to his brothers in his involvement with the workings of the Universe.  On the Exotics, they had bred the Mystic, and on the Friendlies they had raised up the True Believer.

Newsman Tam Olyn watched his sister’s husband – a man under his protection – die in a senseless act of brutal “Friendly” violence, and set himself to the destruction of the whole Friendly culture.

And though a mere man, of Old Earth stock, Tam Olyn was something more as well; singlehandedly, he might just succeed in wrecking worlds… in his way stood a single lonely figure – Jamethon Black, Man of Faith.

Reactions after the break:

So this book apparently won a Hugo.  The voters must have gotten something more out of this book than I did.  It was all right.  It was a nicely paced read, and the prose was good.  The ideas seemed all right, too, but … 

I didn't like the characters much at all.  They all seem like placeholders, with no personalities of their own apart from their role in the overarching plot.  They work as ideas, but not as people, perhaps. 

The plot is similar – I had trouble following cause and effect, and that really weakened the story for me.  Maybe it’s a book that gets better upon re-read.  I don’t imagine that I’ll find the time.

The setting… I’m having trouble accepting the premise of unified blocks of personalities – everyone on this planet is a whatever they breed there – Warrior, Mystic, Religious Fanatic, etc.  Everything else follows that premise, and so the whole thing falls apart for me.  My feel for it is that if a large block of people of the same bent would emigrate somewhere, the minor differences would become major, and things would fracture as badly or worse than before, instead of becoming a mono-culture.  Especially the religious fanatics – apparently all those of religious bent from earth emigrated to the same planet and somehow all the Muslims and Christians and Buddhists and whatever else they could scrounge up got together and agreed on what they should be fanatical about.  I don’t buy it. 

I also don’t buy that a reporter has godlike power in the world.  But that might be the 2010’s talking, rather than the 1960’s where the book was conceived.

At the end – the book was readable.  Everything felt like a slave to the plot, and even that wasn't communicated overly clearly.  Events that are clearly of importance just didn't have the amount of gravitas that they deserved.

Rating: 2 – very readable, but severely flawed.