charlesdee
6/21/2015
In an unspecified future, Earth has begun placing human observers on planets whose evolutionary and social development is much like its own. The observers find a place in the society and operate under the directive to kill no one and not to attempt to alter the course of the planet's history. They wear a headband that broadcasts a continuous visual signal back to earth. They are also able to make an unlimited amount of gold tender and they keep on hand medicines that treat everything from fevers to hangovers.
Don Rumata has been on the planet Arkanar for years. He's taken the identity of a deceased member of a very distinguished family from a distant province. His social position allows him to pass with impunity through most levels of society. The squalid medieval conditions of Arkanar are trying for a human. Rumata has succeeded in making handkerchiefs a modish fashion statement, but he has not done so well with the wearing of underwear or the regular washing of bed linens.
But something is going wrong on Arkanar. They should be entering their renaissance, but forces have taken over who are systematically killing off the "bookworms" and any other progressive element. Power is coalescing around the figure of Don Reba.
He emerged out of some musty basement of the palace bureaucracy three years ago, a petty, insignificant functionary, obsequious and pallid, with an almost bluish tint to his skin. Soon the then-First Minister was suddenly arrested and executed, a number of horror-stricken and bewildered officials died during torture, and this tenacious, ruthless genius of mediocrity grew like a pale fungus on their corpses.
The humans are baffled by this deviation from the historical norms they expect, and the book has pages of discussion and interior monologues about human nature and the forces that shape civilization. That might sound off-putting, but if you have read the Strugatsky brothers' other novels, you know that they are very good at this sort of thing. And the court intrigues and reactionary violence that takes over the narrative are absorbing.
This is a profoundly pessimistic novel, with human behavior degenerating to its vilest level. The vilest and the most servile. Don Rumata sees the potential in the vast numbers of workers and commoners that will survive this reign of terror, but he also knows to expect nothing from them.
Two hundred thousand men and women. Two hundred thousand blacksmiths, gunsmiths, butchers, haberdashers, jewelers, housewives, prostitutes, monks, money changers, soldiers, tramps and surviving bookworms were currently tossing in their bedbug-ridden, stuffy beds; sleeping, making love, recalculating profits in their heads, crying, grinding their teeth in anger or resentment, Two hundred thousand of them... They were passionate, greedy, and incredibly, fantastically selfish. Almost all of them had the psychology of slaves -- slaves of religions, slaves of their own kind, slaves of their pathetic passions, slaves of avarice. And if fate decreed for one of them to be born a master, he wouldn't know what to do with his freedom. He would again hurry to become a slave... The vast majority of them were not guilty of anything. They were too passive and too ignorant. Their slavery was the result of passivity and ignorance, and passivity and ignorance again and again breeds slavery.
It is almost miraculous that after such dark reflections, Don Rumata finds reason to hope.