The Complete Psychotechnic League, Vol. 1

The Complete Psychotechnic League #1

by Poul Anderson

The first of three volumes collecting ALL of the Psychotechnic League future history stories, from multiple Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author Poul Anderson. After World War III ravages the globe, humanity, led by the Psychotechnic Institute, bands together to create peace on Earth and to spread that peace throughout the solar system and beyond. But soon the cycle of war and destruction begins anew. Includes short stories never before collected in a Psychotechnic League volume.

FROM THE ASHES OF WORLD WAR III

World War III has ravaged the globe. Once great nations have been brought to their knees. Now, a new science offers hope for the Psychodynamics, the ability to influence government and popular opinion. Led by the Psychotechnic Institute, humanity denounces its violent ways, once and for all. While peace reigns on Earth, humankind ventures out into the Solar System—and to the stars beyond. But soon the cycle of war and destruction begins anew.

The first of three volumes collecting all of multiple Hugo- and Nebula-Award winning author Poul Anderson's massive future history magnum opus. Includes short stories previously uncollected in a Psychotechnic League volume!

About Poul

"One of science fiction's authentic geniuses."– Chicago Sun-Times

“Anderson fuses elegiac prose and a sweeping vision of man’s technological future…”– Booklist

“One of science fiction’s giants.”–Arthur C. Clarke

Genres: Science Fiction

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 3, 2017

About the author

Pseudonym A. A. Craig, Michael Karageorge, Winston P. Sanders, P. A. Kingsley.

Poul William Anderson was an American science fiction author who began his career during one of the Golden Ages of the genre and continued to write and remain popular into the 21st century. Anderson also authored several works of fantasy, historical novels, and a prodigious number of short stories. He received numerous awards for his writing, including seven Hugo Awards and three Nebula Awards.

Anderson received a degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He married Karen Kruse in 1953. They had one daughter, Astrid, who is married to science fiction author Greg Bear. Anderson was the sixth President of Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America, taking office in 1972. He was a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America, a loose-knit group of Heroic Fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose works were anthologized in Lin Carter's Flashing Swords! anthologies. He was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Robert A. Heinlein dedicated his 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls to Anderson and eight of the other members of the Citizens' Advisory Council on National Space Policy.[2][3]

Poul Anderson died of cancer on July 31, 2001, after a month in the hospital. Several of his novels were published posthumously.


Series:
* Time Patrol
* Psychotechnic League
* Trygve Yamamura
* Harvest of Stars
* King of Ys
* Last Viking
* Hoka
* Future history of the Polesotechnic League
* Flandry

Reviews

[Tim Pendry · Rating 2 out of 5]

The 'Psychotechnic League' sequence is didactic science fiction that is very much of its time (1950s). It has not lasted well and is, frankly, rather boring and simplistic, a reflection of a relatively young man's naive political and adventuresome fantasies.

It seems that Anderson's attempt to create an entire future history based on a rather creepy idea of Nietzschean supermen operating somewhat Schmittian techniques of manipulation and subversion under the banner of the United Nations collapsed later under his own disillusionment with the UN.

He stopped writing these stories in 1968, not uncoincidentally with the era of the Vietnam War which he supported. The United Nations, once the vehicle for the unification of humanity (in his view) in its expansion to the stars, now looked flaccid and weak.

The conspiracy of ruthless liberal elites which Anderson wanted was not on the cards in the 1960s although some would argue that it has very much returned with a vengeance in the decades since then and is now playing its last card with weapons supply to Kiev.

This volume only collects the first four stories, not chronologically in terms of writing but in terms of telling the tale of the psychotechnic universe. In this order, the book only gets up to the point where Earth has to crush an alternative world view that emerges on Venus.

The one point when I thought I might go on to read the rest of the series came with Anderson's evocative and 'realistic' (we now know Venus is uninhabitable for humans) evocation of a sturdy collectivist regime and ideology and its logic in relation to its planet.

Unfortunately even this last story (which originally appeared in Astounding in 1954) collapses half way through into another dull one man and his girl fighting for the future in a tiresome battle and a last minute rescue - things have not moved on very far from Flash Gordon.

I shall not be bothering with the rest of the sequence not because Anderson cannot write well when an idea is up to scratch but because the good writing is placed at the service of such political hogwash and conventional story telling that life is too short to hope he does better later.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the case is ideological. Anderson was on the right and backed the Vietnam War. Here we have the ruthless elite mind-set of the sort of men who could undertake saturation bombing to save villagers by destroying the village.

From that perspective, though actually very bad literature, the stories capture something of the psychopathy of American liberalism at its most expansive. Anderson's vision is supra-national and universal but entirely along expected American ideological lines.

At one point, he seems to predict the rise of national populism as (in his view) an evil based on the central evil of the book - nationalism and war derived from human contestation rather than unification under a manipulative guardian class capable of ruthless action to define the future.

Well, one man's evil is another man's good. I found, reading these tales, a welling up of awareness of what I would think of as evil emerging in the attempt to fight what was merely bad. The future, it would seem, is to be built primarily on lies and murder.

The future, of course, is to be a future of liberal democratic values and 'freedom'. The few can be sacrificed for the sake of the many, expressed most brutally in 'The Big Rain' (the story based on Venus) where our hero knowingly sacrifices his comrades in the greater cause.

This ideology of sacrifice for values is clearly, in later stories, to be spread throughout the solar system and galaxy. Personally, I find it as thoroughly obnoxious as I do its current day iteration which is sacrificing millions of Ukrainians on the altar of liberal expansion.

Yet it is good to see books like this still available. The mentality of Bomber Harris and Curtis LeMay, of Robert McNamara in his Vietnam days, of a self-referential intellectual-professional guardian elite who will die to the last worker for an idea, has to be understood in order for it to be defeated.

I think I would have been quite happy to have seen the villains, unpleasant though they are, wipe the floor with the Psychotechnic League by the time I had finished all four stories, not because they were right but because the League is so very very wrong.

[Riju Ganguly · Rating 2 out of 5]

Poul Anderson is a Grand Master of Science Fiction who has shaped the contours of that world through his writings over a very long period. Unfortunately, like many other works once considered great but now consigned to the fringes, his works depicting adventures of Psychotechnic League have been more or less forgotten. This book, the first volume of such tales, provides us with ample reasons.
It contains~
1. Marius: Echoing the last war, this story sort of sets up the series with a good-vs-bad backdrop.
2. Un-Man: This novella deals with the idea of the League, and how its efforts towards meddling in other’s affairs to nudge them towards greater good (yes, it's a teeth-gnashingly patronising idea) faces problems— including enemy within.
3. The Sensitive Man: Another danger, another set of actions towards finishing off dangerous enemies by moulding their minds after defeating them (seriously creepy).
4.The Big Rain: An action-packed tale of exodus amidst war and tension. This was good.
Overall, these supposedly realistic works have got rather severely dated. Reading them one recognises the need for a 'Prime Directive'. One also appreciates the nuanced approach taken by Psychohistorians in 'Foundation'. While Leigh Brackett's improbable Planetary Romances still manage to charn because of their internal myths and legends, this volume appears only dry and dusty.
Just OK.

[Lis Carey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Poul Anderson began writing his own "future history" in the 1950s, with its starting point being that there would be a limited nuclear war at some point in the 1950s. From that point would develop a secret effort to build a new social structure that could permanently prevent war. This project was founded on a new discipline of human and social psychology, and a secret organization within the UN, secretly manipulating people and events, including the occasional assassination.

You might think these people are the bad guys, but Anderson intended them to be the good guys, building a human civilization of freedom, prosperity, individual freedom, and no more war. Nuclear weapons meant war could never be allowed to happen again. If you've looked at photographs and films from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, including interviews with the survivors, it should be clear why. So Anderson has his initially tiny cadre of people studying the mathematics of the new science of the human mind, who work first to ensure militaristic dictatorship doesn't become an acceptable form of government for UN members, and then to have enough influence to ensure all the countries stay on track and the UN develops toward being a true world government.

One of the interesting features of this story sequence is the Un-Men, the UN's top, and top secret, agents, who undertake all the most dangerous missions to thwart the efforts of nationalists and authoritarians in various countries, including the US, to weaken the UN, strengthen national governments, and bring back the ability of national governments to pursue their view of national interests, even if it means invading and conquering their neighbors. Two things go into making these Un-Men the super-agents that they are. One is superior mental and physical training grounded in the ever-advancing science of the human mind, related to the science that also enables the Psychotechnic Institute to project and manage the future development of human civilization in the direction they want. (It's worth noting that the Psychotechnic Institute is officially independent of the UN, lessening its direct power, but providing a level deniability on both ends.)

The other thing is that one very exceptional man, extremely intelligent, strong, and adventurous, never chose to enlist in the program, but was eventually cloned. The clones emerge identical to the original, not just physically and in some important aspects of temperament and personality, but in every way, except for particular scars that one individual got and another didn't. And this is true to the point that, when necessary, one Un-Man can impersonate another well enough to fool even his wife, in even the most intimate circumstances. This is of course impossible because nurture and life experience does play a role in how we turn out. But in the 1950s, who knew? We were still decades away from cloning Dolly the sheep. The superior science of the mind resulting in more effective education for those to whom it is extended, I'm totally willing to believe as a potential reality. The completely identical Un-Men? That's something I go with for the sake of the story.

Another interesting feature is the story set on Venus. You might argue with the politics of it, and Anderson in his later years certainly did. But this Venus is not the verdant jungle of other sf of this period. It's oppressively hot still, but dry, barren, and uninhabitable in its current state. It's not the real Venus we know now, but it's a lot more realistic than most sf and popular imagination portrayed at the time. The now-independent and unified colonies on Venus are working on terraforming it. But to do so, the colony has become extremely collectivist and top-down, with little to now personal freedom and an ever-present secret police. This is something the 1950s Anderson didn't approve of, the 1990s disapproved of even more, and no one who remembers the USSR, or Mao's China, or other such regimes, would volunteer to live in. Anderson and his protagonist in this story do both concede, and I agree, that some degree of collectivization is necessary to the project they're undertaking. This much, though, stems from the greed and power-hunger of those in charge.

It's also noted that the Venusian political bosses are making use of the as much of the same science the Psychotechnic Institute is using to remake Earth to their vision, and using it quite effectively. And that right there is one of the things I've always loved about Anderson--that ability and willingness to see that there's more than one side, even when he's coming down firmly on one particular side.

Another thing I love is that the characters are interesting, complex, and realistic. People are individuals, not stereotypes or stick figures. There aren't many women in these stories, but the ones that are here, and play significant roles, are also intelligent, resilient, and interesting, as well as varied in their interests and goals. The ones that are more in the background? They look and sound more like what we find conventional 1950s fiction. The basic social roles seem similar. But the ones who are significant characters are real people, without being portrayed as freakish in their own setting.

The stories weren't written in any particular order, but in 2017, Baen gathered them into three volumes, presenting them in internal chronological order, and providing an introduction and interstitial material reframing these stories as the alternate history they became when we didn't have a nuclear war by the end of the 1950s. The stories in this volume range from shortly after the nuclear war, starting with one of the early experts in the new science of human behavior confronting a valued old friend, to try to dissuade him from unfortunately short-term goals, which would result in more war and death in the longer run.

I haven't talked much about the individual stories. They're good stories, and I enjoyed them, but what struck me most deeply in rereading these, is the overall impact, and experience of reading these 1950s stories in the 2020s. Still very good stories, but as different as my politics are from Anderson's in his later years, I agree with him about the weaknesses here. The Venus story isn't the only one where the potential danger of the Psychotechnic Institute's psychometric science is acknowledged, and yes, I think it's a greater danger than the younger Anderson recognized at the time.

And yet these are still very good stories, and I enjoyed them.

Recommended.

I received this book as a gift, and am reviewing it voluntarily.

[D.L. Morrese · Rating 3 out of 5]

Earth is recovering from WW III. It is hoped that the new United Nations can prevent there being a WW IV. This collection of stories, originally published in the pulps in the 1950's and 1960's, tells of the emergence of the Psychotechnic League, a secretive organization within the UN, that clandestinely tries to shape events in accordance with scientific understanding of human psychology, sociology, and history...or something like that...to ensure a peaceful and prosperous future for all humanity. When these were written, science fiction was often more about ideas than about characters or even plots, and there are some interesting ideas in these pages. The characters will appear sexist to modern readers, the tech may seem almost quaint, and some of the science is simply wrong (especially about Venus), but there are some astute and still relevant insights about human behavior. It makes for an interesting read, not only for the stories themselves but for how the future was imagined over half a century ago.

[SciFiOne · Rating 5 out of 5]

1984 Grade A
2023 Grade A-

I read five of the original "Psychotechnic League" books in the 1970s-80s, but I only have 4 and 5 in my collection. They are no longer in print under the original titles. I wanted to read the start again so purchased this Kindle title hoping it had the same content. I think it does. The League future history series is indeed out of date as others have said. But if you ignore the dates, it is good. I had no trouble.

The content is a selection of short stories, novelettes, and a short novel. The league is in its early days, but it does have agents (the focus of the stories) trying to fix the societies on various planets. The content can be little harsh but that is the reality of the fictional history at this point. The stories are not gross enough to put me off. Except for a bit of repetition in the longest story, the writing is excellent.

I enjoyed Anderson's afterward where he praised Heinlein for inventing Future Histories and explained the reasons for the new release.

The book might not be worth reading repeatedly, but I do Recommended it.

[Doug Lewars · Rating 5 out of 5]

*** Possible Spoilers ***

This is classic science fiction on a par with Issac Asimov. True, it was written quite some time ago but it's still excellent reading. In addition, some of the futuristic science has come to fruition, not much maybe but some.

Don't look for character arcs or deep insight into the human psyche. The only 'message' deals with the evils of nationalism and totalitarianism. It was written in a simpler time.

The book consists of a series of stories which lie somewhere between short-stories and novellas. They're arranged chronologically within the setting, not in the order in which they were written. The pacing is good, the action intense, and one never knows how things will turn out. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and recommend it for anyone who enjoys good action packed science fiction.

[Ashutosh Sahu · Rating 4 out of 5]

It probably deserves higher than 4 stars...

It's a good, dark look at an alternate history that never happened from a time that was worried about the consequences of a WWIII

Intentionally or not, the book can be read as a depiction of antiheroes and would-be tyrants, who use repellent tools like cloning and psychotecnic conditioning for their own aim.

Of course the book is a good read simply accepting the narrator's point of view and this as a straight up alternate history.

It features thematic ideas about human enhancement, cloning, and freedom. It took a few pages to really get going but it drew me in. There are arguments about politics and technology and human freedom. What might the future look like if we had the attitudes and ideas of the 1960's and wondered... what if?

[Jon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Several very fun shorts and novellas. They're each very much standalone, though they share world elements. I enjoyed the setting and the Un-Men, as well as the running theme of trying to engineer society. It's a little funny seeing them talk about "those damn nationalists!" periodically, of which there's an essay by Poul at the end apologizing for that sort of thing, but these were very fun stories.. I think my favorite was "The Sensitive Man."

[Dalen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I generally liked most of the stories, even if I disagreed with the author's positions. The author himself said that part of the reason he stopped writing stories in this universe was because his thoughts had changed over the years. Some of the stories were kind of preachy, but overall it was an interesting collection of stories.

[Clay Kallam · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seriously dated, didactic and slow-moving, these Poul Anderson stories about an alternate history that begins with a 1958 atomic war simply don't hold up.

I had high hopes coming in, as most of the old stuff I've read has been pretty good, but not this collection. Skip it ...

[Steve Schinke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Wothwhile, easy read. Nothing special, but interesting concepts and stories.

[Gr1972 · Rating 4 out of 5]

4 out of 5

[Brian Proffit · Rating 5 out of 5]

There's a reason Anderson was voted a Grand Master by SFWA, and the recipient of so many awards. This book is a great example.