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osprey_archerSylvia Louise Engdahl’s Enchantress from the Stars is like Star Trek, if the characters in Star Trek took the Prime Directive seriously (and the women got better parts). It is also like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Lost Prince, in that nary a chapter passes without characters either swearing solemn oaths or going through hell to keep those oaths - except that unlike The Lost Prince, Enchantress from the Stars has a plot that rises to a crescendo that is not merely satisfying but stunning.
Oh, and it has telepathy. And a fairy tale retelling. And one of my favorite heroines of all time, Elana: bright and curious, empathetic, a little impetuous. As the story begins, she’s heading through space to join the Federation’s Anthropological Service, but - entirely against all orders and policy - sneaks onto a landing craft onto a Youngling planet.
(Younglings are people like us who haven’t yet evolved out of wars, greed, etc., and into our full psychic potential.)
Normally, an untrained civilian like Elana would be sent back to the Federation spacecraft sharpish - but because of plot complications, Elana is stuck planetside. So, untrained though she is, she has to take the Service Oath:
“And I, Elana, swear that I will hold this responsibility above all other considerations, for as long as I shall live...”
This is all we get of the Oath, and yet it becomes a mantra that the characters live by as their situation grows steadily more desperate. The Oath demands not only that you would die for it, but that you would go out of your way to get killed for it if need be. That is why Elana is stuck planetside, in fact: one of the Service agents in the landing party got vaporized distracting the Imperial soldiers who are invading the planet from the Federation landing craft.
This was not, let me be clear, a matter of military necessity. A Federation has no plans to go to war with the Imperials, and in any case a Federation landing craft is as technologically advanced over an Imperial one as an atomic bomb is over a tomahawk. The agent had to prevent disclosure, because if the Imperials discovered that there was a civilization hugely technologically advanced beyond them, it would mess up their cultural development.
This, then, is Elana’s mission: to stop the Imperial invasion of Andrecia (a planet where the inhabitants have a medieval level of technology), without disclosing the Service’s existence.
Elana accepts the anti-disclosure position until she visits a local village. She seems starvation - disease - a beggar who had his hands cut off by the king - and she is so horrified that she storms back to her father, the mission leader, who is up there with Atticus Finch in the Best Fictional Father Ever category. “Why doesn’t the Service do something?” she demands. “Why [can’t we] devise some way to correct obviously unnecessary evils without revealing ourselves?”
“The real issue here is the whole concept of ‘obviously unnecessary evils,’” her father replies. “Who are you to say that human suffering is unnecessary?”
Elana of course finds this answer horrifying. Enchantress from the Stars takes place in an Enlightenment universe, where overcoming human suffering truly does lead to lasting human progress (indeed, for the civilizations that make the Federation, has already led to utopia), so the balance of the evidence is on her father’s side; and yet Elana does not cease to find it horrifying.
One thing I really like about this book is that, while Engdahl has a definite point of view and makes it clear that this is so, she doesn’t try to force the reader to accept it. The reader can, with Elana, reject this answer, without rejecting the book, because there is so much going on in it.
One would think that the nature of good and evil and the ultimate disposition of the universe were quite enough to be getting on with in a single children’s story, but Enchantress from the Stars is endlessly prolific with ideas. It deals - and deals well! - with a myriad of other topics: symbolism, the nature of belief, providence, sacrifice (and the ability to meaningful consent to sacrifice in a situation where one doesn’t have all the information), the meaning of love, imperialism...
It has a great anti-imperialist screed: Jarel, a disillusioned Imperial officer, thinks bitterly, “We are on no higher a level than the natives, and we never will be; progress is a myth! If there are superior peoples in the university, it is pure luck...that they have never found us. For if they ever do, they will surely consider the Empire the worst disease ever to threaten the galaxy and will deal with us accordingly.”
It is, in short, a book that is good food for thinking with - and a real pleasure to read, to boot.
Oh, and it has telepathy. And a fairy tale retelling. And one of my favorite heroines of all time, Elana: bright and curious, empathetic, a little impetuous. As the story begins, she’s heading through space to join the Federation’s Anthropological Service, but - entirely against all orders and policy - sneaks onto a landing craft onto a Youngling planet.
(Younglings are people like us who haven’t yet evolved out of wars, greed, etc., and into our full psychic potential.)
Normally, an untrained civilian like Elana would be sent back to the Federation spacecraft sharpish - but because of plot complications, Elana is stuck planetside. So, untrained though she is, she has to take the Service Oath:
“And I, Elana, swear that I will hold this responsibility above all other considerations, for as long as I shall live...”
This is all we get of the Oath, and yet it becomes a mantra that the characters live by as their situation grows steadily more desperate. The Oath demands not only that you would die for it, but that you would go out of your way to get killed for it if need be. That is why Elana is stuck planetside, in fact: one of the Service agents in the landing party got vaporized distracting the Imperial soldiers who are invading the planet from the Federation landing craft.
This was not, let me be clear, a matter of military necessity. A Federation has no plans to go to war with the Imperials, and in any case a Federation landing craft is as technologically advanced over an Imperial one as an atomic bomb is over a tomahawk. The agent had to prevent disclosure, because if the Imperials discovered that there was a civilization hugely technologically advanced beyond them, it would mess up their cultural development.
This, then, is Elana’s mission: to stop the Imperial invasion of Andrecia (a planet where the inhabitants have a medieval level of technology), without disclosing the Service’s existence.
Elana accepts the anti-disclosure position until she visits a local village. She seems starvation - disease - a beggar who had his hands cut off by the king - and she is so horrified that she storms back to her father, the mission leader, who is up there with Atticus Finch in the Best Fictional Father Ever category. “Why doesn’t the Service do something?” she demands. “Why [can’t we] devise some way to correct obviously unnecessary evils without revealing ourselves?”
“The real issue here is the whole concept of ‘obviously unnecessary evils,’” her father replies. “Who are you to say that human suffering is unnecessary?”
Elana of course finds this answer horrifying. Enchantress from the Stars takes place in an Enlightenment universe, where overcoming human suffering truly does lead to lasting human progress (indeed, for the civilizations that make the Federation, has already led to utopia), so the balance of the evidence is on her father’s side; and yet Elana does not cease to find it horrifying.
One thing I really like about this book is that, while Engdahl has a definite point of view and makes it clear that this is so, she doesn’t try to force the reader to accept it. The reader can, with Elana, reject this answer, without rejecting the book, because there is so much going on in it.
One would think that the nature of good and evil and the ultimate disposition of the universe were quite enough to be getting on with in a single children’s story, but Enchantress from the Stars is endlessly prolific with ideas. It deals - and deals well! - with a myriad of other topics: symbolism, the nature of belief, providence, sacrifice (and the ability to meaningful consent to sacrifice in a situation where one doesn’t have all the information), the meaning of love, imperialism...
It has a great anti-imperialist screed: Jarel, a disillusioned Imperial officer, thinks bitterly, “We are on no higher a level than the natives, and we never will be; progress is a myth! If there are superior peoples in the university, it is pure luck...that they have never found us. For if they ever do, they will surely consider the Empire the worst disease ever to threaten the galaxy and will deal with us accordingly.”
It is, in short, a book that is good food for thinking with - and a real pleasure to read, to boot.
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Date: 2013-06-17 10:48 am (UTC)I loved this book so much. I liked the sequel too, but I liked this one better.
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Date: 2013-06-17 12:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-06-17 03:14 pm (UTC)But my library doesn't have it! None of the libraries have it. Not even the university library, which has a fabulous collection of old children's and YA fiction. (Not that I have access to that library any more.)
The downside to discovering books online - one can't guarantee that one will easily be able to find them...
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Date: 2013-06-17 06:27 pm (UTC)