Slave Ship

by Frederik Pohl

3rd printing. Cover by Robert Foster.

Genres: Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy, Fiction

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1957

About the author

Frederik George Pohl, Jr. was an American science fiction writer, editor and fan, with a career spanning over seventy years. From about 1959 until 1969, Pohl edited Galaxy magazine and its sister magazine IF winning the Hugo for IF three years in a row. His writing also won him three Hugos and multiple Nebula Awards. He became a Nebula Grand Master in 1993.

Reviews

[Alien · Rating 3 out of 5]

Der inoffizielle Krieg gegen die Codai-Sekte droht heiß zu werden, denn der Gegner hat eine Möglichkeit entwickelt, Menschen von ferne zu töten.

Über weite Strecken fand ich es gar nicht schlecht. Das menschliche Element gefiel mir ganz gut. Das Gezanke der Hauptperson mit seinem russischen Kameraden war recht witzig.
Der Schluss wirkt aber hastig dahingeschrieben und völlig unausgegoren.
Der mieserable Schnitt bei goodreads ist aber nicht so ganz fair.

[Joachim Boaz · Rating 2 out of 5]

Full review: https://sciencefictionruminations.com...

"Robert Foster’s salacious cover for the 1969 edition of Slave Ship (1956) implies a sort of John Norman-esque — of Gor “fame” — sexist slave girl sci-fi fantasy with collars and all. Don’t worry, I bought the novel knowing full well that the “slaves” were not nubile young women but dogs + cats + chimps + seals drafted into the war effort. But a naked seal on a leash won’t sell [...]"

[Gabriel Kalb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Esse é o tipo de livro que achei por uma mixaria no sebo. Pela capa, horrivel por sinal, eu não esperava nada.
Mas no fim me diverti muito com o livro, a forma que o autor escreve é divertida e flui muito bem.
Apesar da história não ser nada de mais, o livro foi bem divertido de ler.

[Tentatively, Convenience · Rating 5 out of 5]

review of
Frederik Pohl's Slave Ship
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - June 19, 2015

I just finished reading & reviewing Iain M. Banks's 1st SF novel, Consider Phlebas (1987) (my review's here: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/5... ), & it occurred to me that it was the kind of thing that someone might write who might think something like: 'Oh, SF's easy! You just put a bunch of monsters in Outer Space & have them fighting all the time & then add some human love interest.'

THEN I read Slave Ship (1957), Frederik Pohl's 1st solo SF novel (he'd written 5 collaboratively before then), & it was an extreme breath of freshness that had close to none of the clichés that Banks's novel was built on. Largely b/c of the extreme contrast between the 2 bks I'm giving this a 5 star rating (I might ordinarily have given it 4 stars) b/c the Pohl is so much what I like SF to be & the Banks is the opposite. Perhaps I shd call it a Rebound Rating.

Even tho this was published in 1957, Pohl understands the remote warfare that so characterizes the use of smart missiles today: "Even in action, the closest I had ever been to a living Caodai aboard Spruance was a thousand yards of hundred-fathom water." (p 2)

Pohl predicts a completely militarized USA: "It was the first time I had ever been in Florida, and from the observation deck of the airport I could see a skyline of palm trees and hibiscus, just as the travel booklets had promised, back in the days when there were travel booklets. Those were pretty remote days, I told myself—only three or four years ago, but I was a civilian then, and so was my wife. The whole country was civilian then, barring eight or ten million cadres. It was hard to remember—" (p 2)

Pohl has the US's enemy originating from Viet Nam: "There they were—the enemy. The members of the religious cult that had stormed out of old Viet Nam and swept over most of three continents, and appeared to be about ready to take on a couple more." (p 5) What's currently called the Viet Nam War in the US started in 1955 (or even earlier w/ US involvement since it cd be sd to've started w/ advisors in 1950) but wasn't well-known to US citizens at the time. Pohl's story has a full-blown war in progress but it's never declared as such. Sound familiar?

"They called it a cold war. But fourteen million of our men were hotting it up over in Europe, against twenty or so million of theirs. Our land casualties were comparatively low—in the low millions that is.

"And no state of war.

"There was just this one little thing. Our troops were killing theirs all the way from the Pyrenees to the White Sea in local "police actions."" - p 9

Pohl's main character is a bit obtuse, he's a computer expert who doesn't recognize his colleague's experiments w/ using YES/(silence = no) signals for communication w/ a dog as being the equivalent of binary code:

"Language is a supple and evocative thing; how could you dignify a one-word vocabulary by that term? Imagine compressing information, any quantity whatsoever into a simple yes-and-no code.

"Thinking which, I checked the installation of my digital computers, capable of infinite subtle operations, packed with countless bits of knowledge and instruction. And all of it transcribed, summarized and digested into what the mathematicians call the binary system, and reproduced in the computers by the off-or-on status of electronic cells." - p 21

Communication between humans & 'animals" (to me, humans are animals) or, as I prefer, other animals, is a central subject here: "A team of four full lieutenants was reading meaning into the elevation of a dog's tail, and translating it into flipper-positions for the seals they were given to work with." (p 24) Consider this: when I was making my movie entitled "Tents Muir" with some seals in the North Sea in 1988, I waved goodbye to the seals, not expecting any response, & one of the seals lay on its side & waved its flipper, seemingly in reply back to me:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBBjS...

I find this a very convincing example of, at the very least, an unexpected mimicry (a somewhat difficult & unnatural one for the seal) &, possibly, an actual communication. In Slave Ship, Konrad Lorenz is referenced as a pioneer of such communication: "I found out that there was a man named Konrad Lorenz who managed to talk Jackdaw back when Hitler ruled Germany." (p 27) Yet another author whose work I shd read.

"The question, of course, turns upon the definition of the term "language." Bees have been clearly demonstrated to communicate with sets of signal, for example. If one allows only a "spoken" language, we turn to the frog, perhaps the lowest animal to have a voice at all. A species of frog from Santo Domingo owns at least one "word," a sort of pig-squeal alarm cry utterly different from its normal barking sound." - p 145

Check out :50 or so of this excerpt from "Rasps" (a remix of George McCowan's eco-horror movie "Frogs" & Charles M. Bogert's audio research "Sounds of North American Frogs"): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yzZTr...

The idea of non-human languages influencing human language is one very well worth researching further: "A philologist named George Schwidetzky believes he has found traces of Chimpanzee loan-words in ancient Chinese ("ngak"), in a South African Bushman dialect (a tongue click), and even in modern German! (The German word, "geck", derived from Chimpanzee "gack.")" (p 146)

"IN 1931 A GERMAN ANTHROPOLOGIST AND PHILOLOGIST, Georg Schwidetzky, published a short monograph that was translated the following year into English under the misleading title, Do You Speak Chimpanzee? It was an ambitious goal that Schwidetzky set for himself: nothing less than "to discover, through systematic investigation of the speech of animals (in particular apes, monkeys, and prosimians), the first beginnings of speech and the language of prehistoric and fossil men." He proceeded, in self-conscious originality, by "empirical rather than theoretical methods." Schwidetzky, however, is careful to acknowledge the work of his predecessors— Franke, Garner, Boutan, Learned, Yerkes, Furness, Schmid. To many it will come as a surprise that there have long been in existence dictionaries of animal words, of which the most recent is that of Blanche W. [Learned]

"1 Georg Schwidetzky, Do You Speak Chimpanzee? (E. P. Button and Co., 1933)" - Issac Goldman's The Wonder of Words: An Introduction to Language for Everyman - http://archive.org/stream/wonderofwor...

So, 'of course,, yeah, I just ordered a copy of Robert Meearns Yerkes & Blanch W. Learned's Chimpanzee intelligence and its vocal expressions online. Don't I have anything better to do?! & when will I find the time?!

The somewhat naive narrator is annoyed by his Russian colleague who's researching communication w/ dogs: "I counted the spoons of sugar he dumped into his coffee: Six of them." (p 40) Have you ever experimented w/ sugar? I was at a party once where I drank something like 14 cups of tea in quick succession, each of them saturated w/ sugar. A special type of tingling distress resulted. I'll never do that again.

Ahhh, Yugoslavia.. Remember that country? It was kindof like Alfred Jarry's Poland in the Ubu plays. I dated a Yugoslavian woman once, she never forgot, she never forgave. I wondered: are all Yugoslavian's like this? Then I met the Yugoslavian boyfriend of an ex-girlfriend. He was worse. "the Yugoslav Push that had touched off the Short War. That was Semyon's first battle—against Marshal Tito's stubborn little army." (p 41) My Yugoslavian girlfriend sd Tito was good for keeping Yugoslavia united. Given what's happened since then I think Tito must've been quite the man.

There's a thread of 'anti-pacifism' that runs thru this bk. Given that Pohl was no fool I detect more than a little poking fun at the Ignorati here: ""Patchifist, patchifist!" Semyon was bawling; and whether he was the first to have the idea or not I cannot say, but in a moment it seemed that the whole town was screaming, "Lynch the dirty pacifists! String 'em up!"" (p 68) In this instance, the 'pacifists' were anything but. In fact, the 'pacifists' of the novel were.. but I don't want to spoil it for you. Well, maybe I will:

""For ultimate peace!" Winnington flared. "You think we like killing people, we peace men? You're an idiot, you think that peace means sitting quiet and taking punishment, eh?" He was flushed and excited, taking a queer pleasure in the fact that we were all of us near death. "No!" he almost screamed. "That is not pacifism, that's stupidity! We must fight for peace, we must destroy the enemy. Kill everybody who might kill us—then, only then, we'll have peace!"" - pp 109-110

Not exactly the notion of pacifism I grew up w/, eh?! Then again, 'police actions' are to 'keep the peace' & freedom isn't free or probably even French-fried.

I recently read a bk by the Russian writing team the Strugatsky Brothers entitled Space Apprenctice ( https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7... ) There're sections about radiation in that & in my review I wrote:

"I'm reminded of having recently witnessed filmmaker Kathryn Bigelow's K-19, The Widowmaker supposedly based on a real Soviet nuclear sub in 1961 (just the yr before this bk) that was rushed thru in its production b/s of a threat from US nuclear subs. The result being a nuclear accident in wch the crew suffered horribly & many died young. I'm further reminded of Frederik Pohl's bk Chernobyl w/ its attribution of disaster cause being the rushing thru of bad concrete to meet quota. Then again, let's not forget 3 Mile Island: https://youtu.be/WFnEj9c35fE "

Pohl, as w/ so many post-Hiroshima-&-Nagasaki-atrocity mindful people, has the all-too-casual military attitude to radioactivity in a submarine presented here 4 yrs before K-19!:

"For one thing, four inches of sheathing had been stripped from her reactor. It made a nice economy in weight—Weems, from a lumbering snail of a vessel, could now in theory lope along as lightly as a corvette—but it had one drawback that everybody inside her hull was subject to a gentle wash of radiation all the time the reactor was going.

"Semyon looked at me with the roundest of eyes. "Logan," he gasped, "are they making a kamikaze of you?"" - pp 72-73

Never let it be sd that Pohl is w/o imagination. One particularly 'nice' touch is having people getting high, in a socially acceptable way off anthrax: "The anthrax colonies in my system were pretty well established, I had a fine building case of fever and approaching delirium. Any minute now the second layer of the pastille would dissolve and the antibiotics would take over, cleaning out the bacteria and sobering me up." (p 88) Horrifying, yes? &, yet, how many ways of getting 'high' are there that're similarly toxic? Alcohol isn't exactly user-friendly.

Pohl is thorough. He has a warship be named after a religious war rebellion: "We boarded Monmouth, a 40,000 ton carrier" (p 89) Sd naming leading to this reviewer researching it, 1st erroneously thinking it was named after a novel thought to be called "Monmouth the Wanderer" but actually called Melmoth the Wanderer (Charles Robert Maturin, 1820) - wch wd'vee been interesting insofar as according to the back-cover blurb of the Penguin edition that I have "In a satanic bargain, Melmoth has sold his soul in exchange for immortality and now preys on the helpless in their darker moments, offering to ease their suffering" - a good enuf metaphor for militarism. But, no, I was wrong, instead:

"The Monmouth Rebellion, also known as The Revolt of the West or The West Country rebellion, was an attempt to overthrow James II, who had become King of England, Scotland and Ireland upon the death of his elder brother Charles II on 6 February 1685. James II was a Roman Catholic, and some Protestants under his rule opposed his kingship." - https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Monmo...

Then there're the aluminum hats. I was in a movie by Bob Huff where I talked in a NYC park about the use of foil hats by some people in attempt to deflect remote brain manipulation. Then, in 1999, etta cetera & I made a movie called "Foiled Again!" wch partially involved making foil hats for homeless people in downtown Pittsburgh. There's so much to be sd about this subject! W/o getting into it further right now, it's interesting to note that Pohl's reference to such things is the earliest I've come across so far: "He displayed what had just been issued to him, an aluminum helmet, protection against the Glotch. The whole ship was being fitted with them." (p 92) Why, oh why, Mr. Pohl, did you choose aluminum helmets?! Do tell, I'm sure there's way more to this than meets the eye!!

&, yes, yes, Pohl is prescient - in this case I'm reminded of The Autobiography of Malcolm X (w/ the assistance of Alex Haley, 1965) in wch X has the revelation when he visits Islam that 'blacks' & 'whites' aren't necessarily at each throats: "Caodism, like the Mohammedans before then, practiced a rigid sort of tolerance; there was no distinction in skin color or creed for them—if the man whose skin in question was willing to embrace the Caodai revelations and, if necessary, join the Caodai armed forces." (p 113)

&, of course, Pohl is well aware of the machinations of propaganda:

"Picture the Devil come to life.

"Remember what I had seen of old Nguyen. Latrine posters, showing him luring helpless U.N. soldiery into haunts of bawdy vice, his wicked face yellow and fierce, his long fingers clawed like a killer cat's." - p 121

So, yep, I think I'm adding this to my top 50 favorite SF bks of ALL-TIME. ALSO, I haven't even gotten into the title of this bk but all you Animal Liberationists out there will appreciate it.

[Pete · Rating 3 out of 5]

An early and minor work for Pohl. The west is engaged in an active cold war with the east. Pohl only briefly sketches the boundaries, but the west includes the US and Russia (not sure of Europe), and the east is unified by the Caodai religion. It is clear that the cold war is not going well for the west, and the protagonist is recruited to a secret project to train animals to "man" warships. In addition, the east seems to have developed a secret weapon that targets users of ESP. The novel is often amusing but too slight to be very engaging. The plot reminds me a bit of Philip K Dick, but the execution lacks the gonzo touch of PKD.

[Ryan Lieske · Rating 3 out of 5]

Actual rating, probably two and a half stars.

Found this in the Little Library down the street and couldn't resist the cover or the premise. Figured it would be a quick, silly read. It was. The title is misleading, and the "UN Navy recruits animals" pitch doesn't take up as much of the slim novel as it should. But still, animals doing people stuff is always fun. As I said, it's all very silly. But if you don't think too much about it, and if you can get past the unfortunate (but expected) Cold War racism/sexism, you'll probably have a decent time. No clue about that title, though.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

In my opinion, the title of the book does not reflect the story therein. There is a brief allusion to it toward the end, but the statement rings rather hollow. Thankfully, there is a twist in the story that does render the short novel worth reading.

[nathaniel · Rating 1 out of 5]

I think Pohl was trying to pre progressive by having women and non-americans in it, but they are all presented really poorly. The animals aspect ends up having almost nothing to do with what the plot eventually turns out to be.

[Andi Chorley · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first solo volume by Pohl is a quick near future tale of global war with a twist from beyond. He wrote The Day The Icicle Works Closed which the band were named after. Better novels were to come in future years such as The Age of The Pussyfoot which I read as a teen.

[Ezio Vivenzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

The story has a great potential but it’s badly developed. The end is done in a rush of moments and it s not satisfaying.

[Rich DeMartin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting science fiction

[Raja99 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why I Read This Book: I'm a big fan of Frederik Pohl (and have an amusing story of the first time I met him; perhaps I'll tell it sometime). Pohl's first solo novel in 13 years came out last month (April 12th according to his publisher's website). Baen released a bundle of ten (!) classic Pohl books on the 19th; I bought it within minutes of reading the emailed announcement (and quickly got sucked back into Jem ; only the fact I had to finish Great Apes for our SF reading group forced me to put it down). So when I finished Great Apes, I definitely wanted to read a Pohl; the only question was, which one. I discovered that Tor, Pohl's publisher for his latest, posted on their website, asking 13 SF and Fantasy luminaries for their favorite Pohl novel, and Vernor Vinge (!) responded with Slave Ship. While I'd certainly heard of it, I hadn't read it, and was surprised to find I didn't even own a copy. Off to Abebooks! (That's abebooks.com , my favorite used-book meta-vendor.)

I got a copy in very good condition and started to read it in a gingerly fashion. (Reading analog books is annoying: They're so fragile, and they aren't self-illuminating, meaning I have to light up the whole bedroom just to read them.) (Luckily my wife is a good sport.) (On the plus side, analog books tend to have great layout and typography, and older books have actually been proofread by humans.)

Alas, my expectations were too high. While I enjoyed this book, I certainly wouldn't call it my favorite Pohl, or probably even include it among my top ten Pohl books. The cover, and some other sources, led me to believe that there would be a lot more about human-animal communication than there was. On the plus side, this is perhaps his first novel with a claustrophobically grim not-quite-total-warfare future; see Jem, Man Plus (which I've convinced our SF reading group to do in June), and Gateway for others.

My next book? Probably Pohl's Age of the Pussyfoot , which was picked by Neil Gaiman, Larry Niven, and David Brin. And happily I'll be able to read it digitally: Just this morning, Baen released their second bundle of ten (!) classic Pohl books, and Age of the Pussyfoot is among them. (So's Slave Ship; I coulda saved a few bucks and gone green by just waiting a week.)

Rating: 7/10 .

(Finished 2011-05-09 23:57:49.3 EDT +/- 0.04s. Approximately.)

[Joe Santoro · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book was very poorly named, as it has very little to do with slaves or ships. But rather, a near future where a religous Indo-Chinese alliance (called the Caodai) has taken over most of the world (all but the Americas) in the aftermath of a US-Soviet conflict. They call it a cold war, though there is lots of fighting... Pohl seems to mostly be mocking the term. The main character is a Yassarian-like Naval officer, who ends up working with a displaced Soviet (they are 'in exile' in the US) to see if they can learn various animal languages well enough to use them in military operations... seemingly suicide bomber-type missions. Things get urgent as the secret weapon that makes people just drop dead takes it toll.

Of course, it's not that simple. There are strangely named pacifists that seem to be trying to turn the cold war hot... and the caodai seem desparate, too.. but why, if they're winning? Then ending is WAY out from left field.

A very entertaining(probably unintended) precursor to Catch-22, with some really interesting stuff on animal communication, which dominates the first half of the book, and Pohl's afterward.

The down side is it is pretty dated, with no sign of any future tech, despite being far enough in the future for alot of stuff to happen. Very much still a worthwhile read, though.

[Joseph DeBolt · Rating 3 out of 5]

When Mr. Pohl autographed my copy of this book, he expressed much embarrassment over the title, wishing it had been changed.

In the book, the Vietnamese, driven by religious fervor, conquer nearly the entire Eastern Hemisphere; the United Nations, including the United States, are totally mobilized against them. Communication with animals is developed for use in the war, and navel Lieutenant Logan Miller is sent on a last-ditch mission, using a submarine crewed by animals, to find a secret enemy weapon that threatens to tip the stalemate so much that nuclear war is inevitable. But the enemy itself is reeling under the weapon – an alien life form attracted by telepaths – and this discovery ends the war. Full of neat futurist ideas, like most Pohl novels, but not his best writing. A note on the science of animal communication is included. Contrast Robert Merle’s The Day of the Dolphin.

[Rock · Rating 2 out of 5]

Borderline novella in length, and assumes an uncommon familiarity with 1950's military jargon.

My edition had the main twist spoiled on the rear cover. The "Dr Doolittle" segments of the story could have been excised entirely with no real impact on the plot, along with most of the near-future military stuff. In fact the only sci-fi element that are absolutely essential to the overall story is the existence of ESP as an alternative means of communication, with the promised aliens (again, rear cover spoilers) getting a passing mention at the end of the book.

It wasn't unenjoyable, but a decent editor could have cut this in half and had it published in an anthology, which is probably where it belonged.

[Alberto Della Rossa · Rating 2 out of 5]

Amo tantissimo Pohl, ma di tanti suoi romanzi e racconti questo è di gran lunga il peggiore che abbia mai letto. Addirittura mi sono stupito fosse suo; ma d'altronde è un racconto lungo del 56, e pertanto uno dei suoi primi lavori (anche se "I mercanti dello spazio" era già uscito).

[Rob Roy · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read this many years ago, but could not remember the author nor title. Finally tracked it down.

[SciFiOne · Rating 2 out of 5]

1981 grade D+

[Roberto Pizzicannella · Rating 4 out of 5]

"vecchia" cara fantascienza ...

[Clay · Rating 4 out of 5]

4