| Article: 581
From: [email protected] (Aaron V. Humphrey)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: Retrograde Reviews--Frederik Pohl: Jem
Date: 7 May 1994 23:02:19 GMT
Organization: The Anna Amabiaca Fan Club
Frederik Pohl: Jem
A Retrograde Review by Aaron V. Humphrey
I haven't read a lot of Frederik Pohl, and certainly not enough to get
a real handle on his style. I've read the first three Heechee books,
and maybe a few others, but somehow I keep getting him mixed up with
Poul Anderson or something. In any event, I never know quite what to
expect from him.
This book was even more mysterious because all it said on the cover
was "This is the way the world ends..." Which gives away a certain
amount, but my motto is "You can't spoil it any worse than the back of
the book." So.
The world is divided into three power-blocs: Fuel, Food, and People.
The Fuel bloc includes Arabs, British(who apparently are getting oil
in the North Sea), and a few others. Food is the States, Russia, and
most of Europe. People is India, China, and a lot of the Third World.
(Actually, it's not quite clear how Africa and Latin America fit into
this picture...)
A world is found on a distant star in Gemini, called Kung (after
Confucius). The star is a dim red dwarf, and the world is tidally-
locked, so the same side always faces the sun, but there are three
social and possibly sentient species on the planet, so all three blocs
hurry to send colonies there. The planet, after a time called Klong
(son of Kung) gets officially named Jem.
We spend most of our time with the Food bloc people(after all, they're
mostly Americans), but we do get flashes from other viewpoints as
well, including reresentative samples from the three sentient
races--burrowers, surface-dwelling arthropods, and balloonists.
With three power blocs and three sentient races, one might imagine
that they pair off, which they do, in a way. All three races are used
and, to some extent, corrupted, by the humans(obviously these people
never heard of the Prime Directive)in their internecine conflicts.
Meanwhile, spurred on by the immense expenditures of power, money,
etc. the colonization of Jem has required, tensions on Earth get
stretched to the breaking point, and past...it's clear that they
haven't really developed any novel approaches to international
politics in the intervening time(although they do have special
individuals with split-brain surgery that apparently makes it easier
for them to translate languages...), and things break down fairly
quickly.
Altogether, it's a fairly dystopian novel, which can be extrapolated
forwards from our time without too many strange assumptions, the
largest one being that international politics stays about the same.
(The lack of religious conflict between the power blocs is perhaps a
bit unrealistic--Pohl doesn't bring a lot of religion into it, so
perhaps he's just one of the many writers that neglects religion
because it's not important in his own life; but I'm just guessing.)
Furthermore, the sentient races on Jem are exploited just as the
indigenous cultures in the New World and Africa were. And, finally,
the nations are proceeding with the Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD)
deterrence still firmly in place, although Russian Communism seems to
be a non-presence. For a novel written in the 1970s (published in 1977),
this all tends to ring true. Would Pohl have written this novel
differently today? Hard to say. I guess you'd have to read some of
his more recent stuff to get a better idea. Remember, this _is_ the
guy who did a novel on Chernobyl...
%A Pohl, Frederik
%T Jem
%I Bantam
%C New York
%D April 1979
%G ISBN 0-553-13134-6
%O US $2.50
%P 312 pp., pb
--
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