Deconstructing an alien
psychology for mutual benefit (4/5)
You can’t mention Gordon R.
Dickson as an author without mentioning his Dorsai! series. I haven’t
read it. So, now that that’s over with, as a reader, I have found that Dickson
is an author with many highs yet capable of achieving the very low: his short
stories in In the Bone (1987) were fantastic yet his novels Mission to Universe (1965) and The Forever Man (1986) were utter duds. Hitherto, I have yet
to cast him from my bookshelves; The Alien Way and Way of the
Pilgrims (1987) are his last chance for redemption. Lucky for him, The
Alien Way had a winning combination of both the alien condition and the
human condition.
Rear cover synopsis:
“Kator Secondcousin, of the family of Brutogas, only two seasons
grown, found that the Random Factor was smiling upon him.
On a routine exploration mission, his scout ship encountered an alien
artifact drifting in space. He returned to his native Ruml, determined to set
his foot on the past of glory—determined that, against all the odds, he would
win a Kingdom, and found a Famiy.
But Kator Secondcousin did not return to Ruml alone. All unknowning,
he carried a tiny transmitter in his body, that opened his mind to a man on
Earth. Kator’s plans for conquering his Kingdom would meet more opposition than
he could imagine.”
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Pesky, conniving humans have laid enticing relics in open space which
they consider to be most likely visited by aliens. The human relics, derelict
and open to vacuum, are not what they seem; what looks like a destroyed vessel
is actually baited with a worm which transfers a sliver of a piece of equipment
into the retriever. Once implanted in the alien retriever’s nervous system, the
piece of equipment is able to transmit thoughts and sensations, at the speed of
light no less, to the receiver on Earth. The technique had been perfected on
Earth, but the implications for use on aliens causes a rift between the
committee members involved.
A bipedal ursine race, calling themselves the Ruml, have sent a scout
to a sector of space on a routine mission. There, one scout named Kator
Secondcousin sees the derelict alien artifact and knows that the invisible
guiding hand of Random Factor favors him. Killing his crewmate, Kator retrieves
a bag from the relic and unknowingly infects himself with the sliver, thereby
linking his mind on a one-way connection to a human named Jason Barchar back on
Earth. Kator returns to his home planet and announces his discovery of the
drifting artifact yet keeps mum about the worm, which he caches away.
In Washington D.C., the Foundation for the Association of Learned and
Professional Societies has started the illicit program stated above. They are
autonomous, without government oversight, and fully capable of handling
immediate contact with an alien race. However, the six-member committee board
is divided between keeping the project for themselves of handing it over to the
government—Jason, the one who is able to see and experience the alien world and
society—is member number seven who persists on voting to keep the project with
the Foundation until he fully understands the alien society and thought
processes.
Through Kator’s eyes, Jason witnesses, first-hand, the alienness of
Ruml culture. The vicarious experience is so rich that Jason often hallucinates
which reality is his own: the benign human world or the enigmatic Ruml world.
As a mammalian sociologist, Jason is knowledged and experienced enough to be
the first contact with a alien race similar to bears on Earth. Unlike humans,
the singular motivation for the Ruml race is one of honor and honor above all
else—honor for lineage rather than immediate family or self. In the eyes of the
committee, the deaths witnessed and reported by Jason are indicative of
barbarous race, but Jason hesitates to admit this; rather, Jason experiences of
deep connection with the Ruml and aims to understand their basic intrinsic
motivation. He stumbles upon one article which highlights the sensations and
thoughts being delivered to him by Kator.
The scientists on the Ruml homeworld have been able to roughly locate
the source of Kator’s artifact. Because of his righteousness and high degree of
“luck”, Kator is assigned to be the honorary Keysman on the maiden flight to
the home of the Muffled People (as humans care called because of the fabric
they drape over their bodies) in order to investigate the prospects of
colonization; with this advanced scouting mission, Kator hopes to one day found
his own Kingdom and thereby preserve honor in his “family’s” memory. Jason,
however, is privy to everything Kator has been experiencing and therefore knows
of any plot or device the Ruml intend to use on Earth.
Modestly disguising himself as a human, Kator descends to the surface
of Earth to investigate a cavernous underground bunker which may hide the
human’s secret space defense fleet. Galloping to the subterranean structure,
Kator crosses path with a human idly fishing in the creek, grinning with a cigarette
lit between his lips. The conversation is terse and odd, but a connection has
been made.
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My synopsis and the book’s own synopsis don’t do the novel any
justice; my synopsis may be too detailed while the book’s synopsis may be too vague.
When the reader actually ingests the novel, the reader will discover that the
crux of the novel lays with the parallel lives of Jason and Kator, how Jason
becomes affected by the life of Kator, and how Jason has planned out the future
of both the humans and the Ruml. Jason may appear, at times, unreasonably
cocksure or errantly emotional, but the
mind of Jason’s is moving in an idiosyncratic tangent toward a mutually
beneficial result—the Ruml will succeed as well as the humans… Jason just needs
time and the luck of “Random Factor” on his side.
Jason doesn’t err on the side of caution due to the strong influence
of his intuition, which is akin to Kator’s belief that all the coincidences in
his life can be attributed to the sacred Random Factor. While Kator’s
unsupported belief finds him gambling with his future, Jason’s ironclad
resolution is corroborated by his intelligence and research methods. Jason has
observed bears in the wild and remembers a particular research article
explaining the ferocity of the mammalian family, and while this all applies to
bears on Earth, Jason intuits that the same theory can be valid for an ursine
alien race. This sounds like a stretch to the reviewer but it’s allowed to pass…
however, as
Joachim has stated, having the same zoological rant thrust into my reading
pleasure is a tad pretentious and annoying.
My last gripe is quite trite but the idea’s been rattling around in my
head for ages—considering the vastness of the cosmos, the eccentricity of
organic chemistry, and the sporadic divergent branching of evolution, how
likely is it that an alien lifeform will be bipedal, human-sized, furry yet human
in appearance when shaved, and able to be understood by Earthly zoological
standards. I understand many aliens in SF stories are similar to the Ruml, but exceptions
to the norm are rare yet often memorable (a plethora of aliens in James White’s
Sector General series, Greg Bear’s Braids in Anvil
of Stars [1992] or Peter F. Hamilton’s Primes in Pandora’s Star [2004],
to name a few). While the Ruml’s physiology may be generic, Dickson makes
utterly sure that their psychology is alien, yet still understandable by human
standards. As Tom Braden says in George O. Smith's "Catspaw" (1948), "we cannot interpret the thoughts of an alien culture in our own terms and hope to come out right."
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Dickson has redeemed himself by a very small degree. He concentrated
on the foreignness of the alien mind and one man grappling with understanding
that alienness, trying to prevent catastrophe and benefit both races—the Ruml
and the humans. Dickson seemed to have forgotten the appeal of drastically
different alien cultures in The Forever Man (1986), where penned a
vexingly annoying cast with disastrous dialogue behind the drone-like culture
of the Laagi, where xeno-anthropology takes a back seat to the bickering and
ping-pong dialogue. This Dickson is a keeper but I’m not yet eager to gamble my
reading time on another Dickson novel any time soon.
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