ORBIT – Otherworldly Reads, Bold Ideas, and Tales. SF & F Short Stories and Novelettes discussion

I had this and other volumes of the series for ages (over 50 now!), but so far I have read only the first two. I guess most if not all of the stories are in the series Poul Anderson 7-books of collections with 54 total short stories or novellas

Contents
Witch of the Demon Seas • (1951) • novella
Duel on Syrtis • (1951) • short story
Security • (1953) • novelette
Sentiment, Inc. • (1953) • novelette
The Sensitive Man • [Psychotechnic League] • (1954) • novella
The Chapter Ends • [Psychotechnic League] • (1954) • novelette
The Valor of Cappen Varra • [Cappen Varra] • (1957) • short story
Industrial Revolution • [Flying Mountains • 2] • (1963) • novella

Witch of the Demon Seas (1951) novella - it starts like some kind of Conan story, a captured pirate captain Corun (even the name hints) and his crew is about to be executed. The country that captured them is, in reality, ruled by a warlock and his daughter. Corun is separated from his men and is visited by (of course!) that beautiful daughter. She suggests that he can get his freedom if he guides an expedition to the local snake/amphibious people far away. He agrees. (view spoiler)[there is a big battle, later they get to the capital, Corum finds out that all 'magic' is illusion and hypnosis and the warlock planned to hire the amphibians who are powerful mages to rule the world (hide spoiler)] More or less 'classic' story, if it was written today I'd give in 2*, but for its period - 3*

I've never been particularly enamored with Anderson's writings. I'm not sure I could make it through an entire Megapack of his. I still have four of his books to read for the H/N list and I'm not looking forward to them.

Duel on Syrtis (1951) short story A wealthy playboy from Earth comes to Mars to hunt a Martian. In the past, humans enslaved Martians, who had only Neolithic culture and proclaimed them animals, but recently more liberal types gave them rights, so hunting Martians is illegal, but local authorities, who lost their cheap labor turn a blind eye. So we readers, follow the playboy and the Martian, who is too obviously written from an American Indian (up to "He didn’t ask much of life these days—solitude in his tower to think the long thoughts of a Martian and create the small exquisite artworks which he loved; the company of his kind at the Gathering Season, grave ancient ceremony and acrid merriment and the chance to beget and rear sons; an occasional trip to the Earthling settling for the metal goods and the wine which were the only valuable things they had brought to Mars; a vague dream of raising his folk to a place where they could stand as equals before all the universe."). How brutal humans are these days - to prevent his victim from escaping, the playboy circled his 'hunting gounds' with fastly decaying radioactive elements... (view spoiler)[The Martan not only wins, but gets a spaceship and tech to share with his people (hide spoiler)] 3*
Security (1953) novelette the future totalitarian and world-dominating USA, where liberties were curtailed because of 'a state of emergency which has lasted unusually long, seventy-two years to be exact'. Allen Lancaster is a scientist in good standing. He is approached by a security man for a top-secret project, which is conducted by a rag-tag crew on a secret space station. I guess readers easily see that it is a ruse by these subversives, but he is sure he is working for the government. He likes to work with them, for no one snitches or sells others to the secret police. He succeeds in turning a discovery of superior dielectrics into a cheaply produced item and returns to his old life, which now doesn't fit him... clear libertarian vibes in this one, but I support libertarian over totalitarian any day. 3*

Allan wrote: "I've never been particularly enamored with Anderson's writings."

In my teens, he, for a short time, was my favorite SFF writer. His Time Patrol series was an intro into the very idea of alt-history for me, and his Three Hearts and Three Lions was a very good fantasy back then (I had too few to compare).

However, so far, all the works in this collection are passable but mediocre

I have mostly been "meh" about Poul Anderson always, except for (I think) Operation Chaos or one of the others in that series. https://www.goodreads.com/series/6263...

It's interesting to me that Allan is not that excited about Anderson, either

Sentiment, Inc. (1953) novelette Colin Fraser is an engineer and plans to marry Judy, who is in love with him. However, after she took part in a strange but well-paid psychological experiment, she suddenly married a rich guy, whom she had earlier disliked. It turns out that (like in the first piece in this collection, shows how authors re-use the ideas they like) a psychologist Peter Kennedy used a special machine to impose preferred attitudes (view spoiler)[Half of Gavotti’s machine is a still more delicate encephalograph. It can measure and analyze the minute variations in electrical pulses corresponding to the basic emotional states. It won’t read thoughts, no; but once calibrated for a given individual, it will tell you if he’s happy, sorrowful, angry, disgusted, afraid—any fundamental neuro-glandular condition, or any combination of them.”

He paused. “All right,” said Fraser. “What else does it do?”

“It does not make monsters,” said Kennedy. “Look, the specific emotional reaction to a given stimulus is, in the normal individual, largely a matter of conditioned reflex, instilled by social environment or the accidental associations of his life.

“Anyone in decent health will experience fear in the presence of danger; desire in the presence of a sexual object, and so on. That’s basic biology, and the machine can’t change that. But most of our evaluations are learned. For instance, to an American the word ‘mother’ has powerful emotional connotations, while to a Samoan it means nothing very exciting. You had to develop a taste for liquor, tobacco, coffee—in fact most of what you consume. If you’re in love with a particular woman, it’s a focusing of the general sexual libido on her, brought about by the symbolizing part of your mind: she means something to you. There are cultures without romantic love, you know. And so on. All these specific, conditioned reactions can be changed.”
“How?”
Kennedy thought for a moment “The encephalographic part of the machine measures the exact pulsations in the individual corresponding to the various emotional reactions. It takes me about four hours to determine those with the necessary precision; then I have to make statistical analyses of the data, to winnow out random variations. Thereafter I put the subject in a state of light hypnosis—that’s only to increase suggestibility, and make the process faster. As I pronounce the words and names I’m interested in, the machine feeds back the impulses corresponding to the emotions I want: a sharply-focused beam on the brain center concerned.

“For instance, suppose you were an alcoholic and I wanted to cure you. I’d put you in hypnosis and stand there whispering ‘wine, whisky, beer, gin,’ and so on; meanwhile, the machine would be feeding the impulses corresponding to your reactions of hate, fear, and disgust into your brain. You’d come out unchanged, except that your appetite for alcohol would be gone; you could, in fact, come out hating the stuff so much that you’d join the Prohibition Party—though, in actual practice, it would probably be enough just to give you a mild aversion.” (hide spoiler)] and for a prof it is just a sideline, he plans to improve the society... so far the best piece, but still only 3.5*

The Sensitive Man [Psychotechnic League] • (1954) novella - this one I would have loved as a teen: a superman fighting villains on a far-away island... Dalgetty is a member of Psychotechnic Institute, an organization that attempts to improve humanity in a libertarian, anti-totalitarian way. This story is partially a soapbox for preaching, but I like this stuff since reading Robert A. Heinlein. Dalgetty's teacher, he calls 'Dad', is kidnapped by rivals and while trying to find him, Dalgetty is also kidnapped and sent on a remote private island. There he shows supernatural reaction and speed to escape (the institute trains using one's body at max potential). (view spoiler)[The enemy—the old and protean enemy, who had been fought down as Fascist, Nazi, Shintoist, Communist, Atomist, Americanist and God knew what else for a bloody century—had grown craftier with time. Now he could fool even himself.
“It’s a complicated story,” said Dalgetty, “but essentially Actionism is a—a Weltanschauung. We’re still recovering from the World Wars and their aftermath. People everywhere are swinging away from great vague capitalized causes toward a cooler and clearer view of life.
“It’s analogous to the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, which also followed a period of turmoil between conflicting fanaticisms. A belief in reason is growing up even in the popular mind, a spirit of moderation and tolerance. There’s a wait-and-see attitude toward everything, including the sciences and particularly the new half-finished science of psychodynamics. The world wants to rest for awhile.
“Well, such a state of mind has its own drawbacks. It produces wonderful structures of thought but there’s something cold about them. There is so little real passion, so much caution—the arts, for instance, are becoming ever more stylized. Old symbols like religion and the sovereign state and a particular form of government, for which men once died, are openly jeered at. We can formulate the semantic condition at the Institute in a very neat equation.
“And you don’t like it. Your kind of man needs something big. And mere concrete bigness isn’t enough. You could give your lives to the sciences or to inter-planetary colonization or to social correction, as many people are cheerfully doing—but those aren’t for you. Down underneath you miss the universal father-image.
“You want an almighty Church or an almighty State or an almighty anything, a huge misty symbol which demands everything you’ve got and gives in return only a feeling of belonging.” Dalgetty’s voice was harsh. “In short, you can’t stand on your own psychic feet. You can’t face the truth that man is a lonely creature and that his purpose must come from within himself.” (hide spoiler)] I like that the ideas here make me think (view spoiler)[“I take it you favor libertarian government,” he said. “In the past it’s always broken down sooner or later and the main reason has been that there aren’t enough people with the intelligence, alertness and toughness to resist the inevitable encroachments of power on liberty.

“The Institute is trying to do two things—create such a citizenry and simultaneously to build up a society which itself produces men of that kind and reinforces those traits in them. It can be done, given time. Under ideal conditions we estimate it would take about three hundred years for the whole world. Actually it’ll take longer.”

“But just what kind of person is needed?” Elena asked coldly. “Who decides it? You do. You’re just the same as all other reformers, including Meade—hell bent to change the whole human race over to your particular ideal, whether they like it or not.”

“Oh, they’ll like it,” he smiled. “That’s part of the process.”

“It’s a worse tyranny than whips and barbed wire,” she snapped.

“You’ve never experienced those then.”

“You have got that knowledge,” she accused. “You have the data and the equations to be—sociological engineers.”

“In theory,” he said. “In practice it isn’t that easy. The social forces are so great that—well, we could be overwhelmed before accomplishing anything. And there are plenty of things we still don’t know. It will take decades, perhaps centuries, to work out a complete dynamics of man. We’re one step beyond the politician’s rule of thumb but not up to the point where we can use slide rules. We have to feel our way.”

“Nevertheless,” she said, “you’ve got the beginnings of a knowledge which reveals the true structure of society and the processes that make it. Given that knowledge man could in time build his own world-order the way he desired it, a stable culture that wouldn’t know the horrors of oppression or collapse. But you’ve hidden away the very fact that such information exists. You’re using it in secret.”

“Because we have to,” Dalgetty said. “If it were generally known that we’re putting pressure on here and there and giving advice slanted just the way we desire, the whole thing would blow up in our faces. People don’t like being shoved around.”

“And still you’re doing it!” One hand dropped to her gun. “You, a clique of maybe a hundred men.…”

“More than that. You’d be surprised how many are with us.”

“You’ve decided you are the almighty arbiters. Your superior wisdom is going to lead poor blind mankind up the road to heaven. I say it’s down the road to hell! The last century saw the dictatorship of the elite and the dictatorship of the proletariat. This one seems to be birthing the dictatorship of the intellectuals. I don’t like any of them!”

“Look, Elena.” Dalgetty leaned on one elbow and faced her. “It isn’t that simple. All right, we’ve got some special knowledge. When we first realized we were getting somewhere in our research we had to decide whether to make our results public or merely give out selected less important findings. Don’t you see, no matter what we did it would have been us, the few men, who decided? Even destroying all our information would have been a decision.”
His voice grew more urgent. “So we made what I think was the right choice. History shows as conclusively as our own equations that freedom is not a ‘natural’ condition of man. It’s a metastable state at best, all too likely to collapse into tyranny. The tyranny can be imposed from outside by the better-organized armies of a conqueror, or it can come from within—through the will of the people themselves, surrendering their rights to the father-image, the almighty leader, the absolute state.
“What use does Bertrand Meade want to make of our findings if he can get them? To bring about the end of freedom by working on the people till they themselves desire it. And the damnable part of it is that Meade’s goal is much more easily attained than ours.
“So suppose we made our knowledge public. Suppose we educated anyone who desired it in our techniques. Can’t you see what would happen? Can’t you see the struggle that would be waged for control of the human mind? It could start as innocuously as a businessman planning a more effective advertising campaign. It would end in a welter of propaganda, counter-propaganda, social and economic manipulations, corruption, competition for the key offices—and so, ultimately, there would be violence.
“All the psychodynamic tensors ever written down won’t stop a machine-gun. Violence riding over a society thrown into chaos, enforced peace—and the peace-makers, perhaps with the best will in the world, using the Institute techniques to restore order. Then one step leads to another, power gets more and more centralized and it isn’t long before you have the total state back again. Only this total state could never be overthrown!” (hide spoiler)] 3.5*

The Chapter Ends [Psychotechnic League] • (1954) novelette the most lyrical, maulding piece so far. If the previous was about the beginnings of the Psychotechnic League, this one is much closer to its end (I guess) - millennia passed, humans spread across the galaxy, they even evolved a way to space travel w/o any additional tech. One of such 'galactics', Jorun, comes to Earth, which is a forgotten backwater. His goal is to help to transport an unmodified human rural community from the planet - there is an agreement between humanity and alien Hulduvians - mankind gets the galactic core, while the aliens get the outer part of our galaxy, including the Solar system. The locals are mostly reluctant to leave and one old man plans to stay there... 3.25*

I never read any of these Psychotechnic League stories. Wikipedia has an informative article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Psy...

The Valor of Cappen Varra [Cappen Varra] • (1957) short story Cappen Varra is an adventurer on a Medieval (fantasy?) world. This time he is dropped on an island where she-troll lives to save a young woman enslaved by her. He wisely uses rules to deal with magic creatures like saying three truths to get immunity from attack and completes the quest. 2.5*
Industrial Revolution [Flying Mountains • 2] • (1963) novella people living on asteroids reminisce about how they started the revolution. Again, quite negative USA, this time after a victory of Social Justice (note, it was published before Lyndon Johnson's Great Society program), they decided to halt private entrepreneurship at the belt. Earth sends a battleship that 'accidentally' loses a nuclear torpedo, so they have to evacuate. The locals find a way to respond. 3*