Harvest of Stars.

• Author: Anderson, Poul

ONE DIFFICULTY THE WRITER OF SCIence fiction faces is that it seems quite likely that the world will be largely incomprehensible to us 100 years from now. There may well be self-aware computers a good deal smarter than any of us carbon-based life forms, and even mere human folks may be able to plug their brains directly into networks, giving them complete access to the sum total of human knowledge. If, when plugged in, you can recall anything from the gist of Joyce's Ulysses to historical trends in peanut production from 1942 to 1957 as easily as you remember your mother's maiden name, will you ever want to unplug and feel drastic intellectual diminishment? And what does society look like if everyone has this kind of access to information all of the time? We may well be approaching a cusp in history that changes things as drastically as the agricultural and industrial revolutions.

In Harvest of Stars, Poul Anderson takes a look at the human future and doesn't like what he sees. He likes individual freedom, open skies, wilderness, and challenge to the human spirit; and he doesn't think the future offers much opportunity for any of them.

To support the teeming billions, the environment will be carefully regulated, every square inch of arable land exploited, and the few remnants of wilderness kept alive through active human intervention. Just as machines have largely supplanted physical labor, computers will largely supplant intellectual work; jobs will be fewer and generally meaningless. Life from cradle to grave will be regulated and planned. Even resources from space will only stave off the day when initiative becomes meaningless, when machine intelligences function in a realm beyond our understanding and only those humans willing to become half-machine themselves have any real role to play in civilization.

Note that Anderson isn't a doomster: Hey, humanity has a future, ecocatastrophe won't do us in, and we'll learn to manage the planet sustainably. And Anderson thinks his likes are a minority taste; probably most people would be happy to live in a stable, controlled society that doesn't demand that people work.

IF THIS WERE ALL THERE WERE TO HARVEST of Stars, we wouldn't have much of a story, merely a gloomy portrait of the future. It's just the backdrop, though. Anderson's real story is about the few obsessive folks who cross the gulf of stars to found a new society on a planet orbiting Alpha Centauri. First, they have to survive...