The Big Front Yard discussion

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I finished Empire. Some Sci Fi is less a story ABOUT the future and more a story FROM the future. To me Empire feels like the latter. By that I mean that when I read this it feels like it was written a few hundred years from now (excepting, of course for the parlance) about events that happen just one or two hundred years from now. Empire is essentially historical fiction from the future and could be compared to There Will Be Blood which, if written in the 1600s, would probably be considered Science Fiction. The struggle for power over, and by way of, a power source.

While the technology in the story is certainly bedazzling and quasi-magical (to us 21st century citizens) it really just plays a supportive role. There is no exploration of the larger implications of the tech; time travel, teleportation, remote control / viewing, power manipulation on a humungous scale. I'm not necessarily disappointed by this, it's just an observation of how this differs from a story like Cosmic Engineers.

I was half-wishing to not like this book just so I could title a post "Empire Strikes Out", but I actually enjoyed it alright. I wasn't crazy for it, all in all a good read.

For what it's worth, here's what I wrote on some forum or other a few years ago:


Clifford D. Simak
Empire (1951)

John W. Campbell has been described as one of the most influential figures in the history of science-fiction, this accolade deriving from his becoming editor of Astounding in 1937. It is fairly safe to say that Campbell had a significant influence on the writing of Asimov and other golden age authors by encouraging them to really go nuts, to express themselves, to let it all hang out. In other words, if not for John W. Campbell, we'd still all be watching variations on Flash Gordon, as opposed to just most of us still watching variations on Flash Gordon.

Empire was written by Campbell, but realising it was crap, he asked Clifford Simak to see if he could salvage something. Simak did his best but came to the conclusion that you can't polish a turd; then some years later, along came Galaxy magazine and published it regardless. Members of the Simak Wrecking Crew have repeatedly warned me away from this one, and it seems that were Simak alive, he too would probably take to frowning, but a nerd has needs.
Okay. Let's take a quick look at the text:

Wilson turned around, stared at the Martian Club. A man needed money to pass through those doors, to taste the drinks that slid across its bar, to sit and watch its floor shows, to hear the music of its orchestras.

You can almost taste the Martini, can't you?; almost feel the necktie you aren't wearing loosening after a hard day at the office. I thought there was a lot of pipe smoking going on in E.E. 'Doc' Smith, but Empire borders on I Love Lucy with rockets and force fields, contemplative pipes gritted between teeth on pretty much every page.

This said, it would be somewhat wanky to pillory Empire for the crime of having been written when it was written, particularly when it is for the most part a decent novel within certain limitations, despite the feelings of its authors. Although the pace is undeniably pulpy, there's more than enough substance to hold the attention half a century later: the barely plausible science of Manning's material energy engines; surreal interludes with talking statues and projected humans the size of tower blocks; Titan as home to a penal colony decades before the the idea cropped up in Perry Rhodan or Judge Dredd; and a central theme warning against the corruption inherent in big corporations, one of Simak's major preoccupations, one to which he would return time and again and which I guess made him an obvious choice for the rewrite in Campbell's view. So regardless, Empire reads very much like Simak, albeit a slightly pulpier Simak with a pipe fixation, and only the final chapter's uncharacteristic reference to alien civilisations as potentially hostile seems to clash with the name on the cover.

Actually, if a few more of the pulps had been this well-written they might have been better remembered.

Thanks, Fred and Lawrence, for the comments. I avoided reading them until today because I've been behind in reading Empire. I've been catching up on more recent short fiction instead.

I mostly enjoyed Empire despite finding it a slog to get through some of the pseudo-science explanations. I confess that I skimmed a bit to get through.

I agree that the best part of the book are the wild displays of power. As Fred notes, this is also the weakest part of the book because just as soon as something awesome is introduced, its wider ramifications are ignored. The politics are simplistic and everything is nice and neat. There are serious moral questions that are barely glossed over.

I haven't read any Doc Smith or much other 30s-40s space opera. My impression is that it's fun but disposable, which is pretty much how I feel about this novel.

p.s. Next book up is Time and Again (or First He Died or Time Quarry or whatever you want to call it).

Oooh lovely. There's a review linked somewhere in my list of books read (read as First He Died) though of course you may want to leave that for later. A very impressive book I thought, with a lot going on.