“I think the Overgovernment prefers the species to continue to evolve in its own way. On the record, it’s done well. They don’t want to risk eliminating genetic possibilities which may be required eventually to keep it from encountering some competitive species as an inferior.” (Ticos Cay, The Demon Breed)
* * *
The Service is also pushing the use of psionic machines in the Federation. People with no psi talent of their own will be empowered to deal with psis. Mind shields are available for defense, and powerful mind-reading machines, such as the ones at the Orado City Space Terminal or Transcluster Finance, will provide the advantages of psi to ordinary people.
As part of their plan to introduce psi to the Hub on a larger scale, one job of the Psychology Service is to control the fear of psis. We see them doing this in several ways. They clean up after psis (like Telzey) by providing believable ordinary explanations for extraordinary events (such as in “Resident Witch”). If a psi won’t keep under cover, they arrange to ship them off to someplace like Askanam (“Glory Day”), or the psis disappear into rehab—as happens to Wakote Ti and Alicar Troneff.
The Service also disseminates false stories, minimizing the effectiveness of psi. For example, Assistant Secretary Duffold believes that “the psi boys had produced disturbing effects in various populations from time to time, but in the showdown the big guns always had cleaned them up very handily.”
The psis themselves have a different point of view. “The way the Alattas have worked it out, the human psis of the time, and especially the variations in them, had a good deal to do with defeating the Elaigar at Nalakia.”
“The function of the Overgovernment is strategy. In part its strategies are directed at the universe beyond the Federation. But that is a small part.” (Lord Batras, The Demon Breed)
Only a small part of the Psychology Service’s attention is directed outward—toward possible enemies beyond the Hub. We’ll see more of those in Volume 4 of this series. But you’ve already read about the top-secret Service Group called Symbiote Control, whose job is to watch over aliens living among the Hub population. With typical Service attitude, symbiotes are left alone as long as they don’t make trouble—after all, some of them are actually useful. The Service is watchful, but only takes action when they find a harmful parasite instead of a symbiote.
“We can say in general now that the Federation is a biological fortress armed by the nature of its species.” (Lord Batras, The Demon Breed)
This attitude pervades the top level of the Federation Overgovernment. They treat the human species as an evolving animal and the Federation as an ecology. They aren’t out to create perfection. If survival is a good enough goal for nature, it’s good enough for the Federation and the Psychology Service.
What kind of animal does the Overgovernment want man to be? Aggressively competitive, but intelligently aggressive. Anything less, and they will be swamped from the outside. Anything more, and they risk a return to the War Centuries. Their solution is to give men an outlet for their aggression within the bounds of society. Private wars are allowed. Crime is only lightly controlled, and local governments are encouraged to handle crime themselves. Nile Etland suggests this is a substitute for open warfare.
“It’s really more than a substitute,” Ticos said. “A society under serious war stresses tends to grow rigidly controlled and the scope of the average individual is correspondingly reduced. In the kind of balanced anarchy in which we live now, the individual’s scope is almost as wide as he wants to make it or his peers will tolerate.” (The Demon Breed)
External threats are met with a very Hub-centric view. While the threat itself is handled expeditiously, the Overgovernment is more worried that such attacks will upset this carefully maintained balance. The Hub is deliberately being kept at the very edge of exploding into violence.
The Overgovernment has shown it is afraid of the effects continuing irritations of the kind might have on its species. We too should be wise enough to be afraid of such effects. (Lord Batras, The Demon Breed)
THE HUB SERIES: Editor’s commentary, Part II
by Eric Flint
There are basically two things I want to cover in this second installment of my commentary on the editing I did for the Hub series. The first is to cover the material which I skipped over in Part I of my commentary, the question of “updating” the text. The other is to explain how and why I edited the novel Legacy which is the centerpiece of Volume 3.
Updating
Guy Gordon and I did a certain amount of “updating” all through the Hub series. But there was never very much of it, and most of that was multiple instances of the same thing. The most concentrated “updating” took place in Legacy. So I’ll go through those instances in order to illustrate what was involved.
The following are the main instances in Legacy in which we “updated” the story. I’ll give a brief commentary on each one, and then make some general remarks afterward.
“Ungh,” Quillan said disgustedly. “You make it sound like the chick’sgirl’s got built-in space drives. You can stop her, can’t you?”
The term “chick” was changed to “girl” because it’s an outdated slang expression. Ubiquitous in the 60s, when Schmitz wrote the novel, but rarely used today. It was not changed, by the way, because of any concerns over “political correctness.” Lots of people object to the term “girl” being applied to a grown woman also. But, whether rightly or wrongly, that term is still in common usage and most closely approximates Schmitz’s slang term. The change has no effect whatever on the story itself.
I might mention that there were two instances in the story “Lion Loose,” which appears in this third volume, where Quillan also used the term “chick.” In both instances, we changed the term to “girl.” Worth noting, however, is that we did not at any time change Quillan’s constant use of the term “doll,” despite the fact that “doll” is probably just as dated a term as “chick.”
Why the difference? Between “doll” really is an integral part of Quillan’s personality. Unlike the term “chick,” which he uses only occasionally, he uses the term “doll” almost every time he addresses a woman. Removing it, while it might have lessened a certain obsolescence, would have significantly altered his persona. Which removing his rare use of “chick” doesn’t.
If not gabby, the Precol blonde was a woman of her word. Trigger had just started lunch when the office mail-tube receiver tinkled brightly at her.She reached in, took out a flat plastic carrier, snapped it open. The paper that unfolded itself in her handIt was her retransfer application. At the bottom of the form was stamped “Application Denied,” followed by the signature of the Secretary of the Department of Precolonization, Home Office, Evalee.
Here, the issue is technological. At the time Schmitz wrote the novel, pneumatic tube delivery systems were the “tech rage” of the era. Today they are hardly ever used. Since the mechanism by which the message is delivered has no bearing on the story itself, Guy and I eliminated the glaring obsolescence by simply cutting the specific mention of it. After the cut, by default, the reader will simply assume that the transmission was somehow electronic.
“Cigarette?””No hard feelings, are there?” the Commissioner’s over-muscled henchman inquired amiably.
Trigger glanced at him from the side. Not amiably.”No, thanks.”
“No hard feelings, are there?” He looked surprised.
“Yes,” she said evenly. “There are.”
He looked surprised.
The issue of smoking in the Schmitz stories was handled case by case. In most instances, we left it in. But this was an instance where the social obsolescence was glaring. Try offering a cigarette today to an unknown woman in an aircraft, and you are likely to get arrested. When I read it while editing the book, my reaction was to break into laughter.
The little exchange serves no function whatsoever in the story except providing the reader with what writers call an “audio-visual cue.” Those are the multitude of little interjections which writers insert into dialogue in order to give the reader the illusion that “they are there.” Without enough visual cues, dialogue reads like abstract discussions in a vacuum.
(Here too, by the way, social conventions change. Much fiction in the 19th century was characterized by page after page of pure dialogue with no clues whatsoever — not even a mention of the speakers’ names, often enough. But to a modern reader it’s a bit jarring and hard to follow.)
In some instances, of course, the audio-visual cue is used to amplify the dialogue. That is typically done with mannerisms such as sighing, shrugging, etc. But, more often than not — and this is the case here — the specific cue is simply irrelevant to the story. Quillan could just as well have scratched his chin or leaned back in his seat.