“Oh what a basta is Asta Zangasta.” If you recognise this, you’re probably familiar with one of my favorite ‘influences’ – Eric Frank Russell. If you’ve read them both, it won’t surprise you that he was an influence on Sir Terry Pratchett too.
Now, while it obvious to all that Asta Zangasta is indeed a basta, for those who haven’t read it, it comes from NEXT OF KIN and is the chant of the POWs trying to provide cover for the escaped prisoners – Asta Zangasta being the thug-in-chief of the world onto which our hero crash-landed.
I suppose I like it so much because it is the story of an ingenious and anti-authoritarian individual triumphing over a massive, brutal, bureaucratic dictatorship.
I know. Very unlikely. But like his book WASP – based on the concept of a tiny creature – a fraction of an ounce, being able to cause the crash of several tons of motor-car, and kill the four humans in the car as a result. This is then extrapolated up to bringing down an entire planet, with just one saboteur. Terry Pratchett described WASP as a “Funny Terrorist’s Handbook”. No, it does not teach you how to make bombs. Bombs are weak-sauce, compared to the psychological debilitation of a population. WASP was about you how to frighten a society into killing itself, with over-reaction. Looking at modern terrorism, and the response to it, one has only to look at the cost in manhours of the TSA to realize the man was remarkably prescient.
The point I am trying to make is that as much in books as reality, it is not about applied force, or even how much of it there is, as it is about how and where that force is applied. As writers I sometimes feel we are phase 1 of the Wasp and sometimes Phase 2. Well, I certainly have been. And we’re up against an institutional an enemy who has moved past stage 3 (the assassination of people’s jobs and reputations) and well into phase 4 (with real and imagined surveillance), making talking about the problem dangerous or at least something we’re afraid of doing.
But as EFR accidentally pointed out, the one thing that authoritarians cannot cope with is humor. The fact that he was writing libertarian ‘message’ it seems was invisible. Because it was funny, it didn’t feel like a sermon – but it still made a point. It… largely passes them by, being the fifth dimension to a people who need to take themselves seriously, or no-one else possibly could.
If, like me, you dislike the slow creep to authoritarianism (socialism, to be realistic, is always authoritarian – nanny government is supposed to provide, but always dictates in the process – and the provision is shabby to non-existent) the humor in my stories always contains the seed of doubt about… well, everything we are told is absolutely certain and true.
Of course, this is true. Would I make a joke of something this important?
Well, yes.
Mad Genius Club 
15 responses to “Wasp”
“Wasp” is one of my lifetime favorite SciFi books. I’ve loved it since I was maybe 12. It was the first Cold War-related fiction I ran across, and the whole how-to-scare-a-city-subversively was an amusing education (before the 60’s really got rolling).
But it does have one period oddity which didn’t strike me until I had read it several times. In this story of sending a Terran to (in disguise) roam around an entire enemy city on their planet to post notices of a (fictitious) underground opposition, to set off (harmless) bombs to indicate internal dissent, etc., etc., to soften them up mentally for conquest/suppression, our hero travels all over a city, takes public transport, enters shops, and so forth. The population and its behaviors are very human-like, enough that he can pass. But in the entire book, as he describes strollers, shoppers, commuters… there is not one female. This is not some sort of point about the culture (which is entirely presented as very human-like, and a parody (of Russians) thereof) — no this clearly just doesn’t occur to the writer in the context of the urban scenes he presents. The only occurrence of the words “she” or “her” in the book is in relation to a vehicle.
Even as a young adolescent, my mind flashed to TV images of the Apollo Space Center, that multi-tier level of scientists, and I realized for the first time that there weren’t any women there, either. It was both bizarre and inexplicable. It made me suddenly aware of the water I was swimming in, for my own culture — the first time I realized there might be (but ultimately weren’t) career obstacles.
I wouldn’t have found that at all odd in some genres (e.g., Western-in-sagebrush), but imagine a typical urban Pratchett story without any women, even as non-player parts. And I didn’t even notice it myself until I’d read the book many times, which bothered me personally. I’ve never forgotten that lesson about invisibility and determined to never let it happen to me.
Of course, by a year or two later I was working summers for my father’s business and devouring Atlas Shrugged. 🙂
It’s curious because going over my w(n)ip to try and get it going again, your comment for me thinking it who’s what in it, and apparently I’ve got a complete mental map of which social roles are one, the other, or mixed, that I had no prior awareness of.
I wonder if that is a product of the time I grew up in, or a natural outgrowth of digging into a time period with discrete roles?
I bet it’s the latter.
There’s nothing like trying for ever-better verisimilitude to fill in blanks you didn’t know you had anent social situations, and naturally that expands how you perceive not only your own social interactions but those of your fictional characters as well.
That makes sense. And I think it started from a throwaway line how the medic couldn’t be female, because they don’t make female constructs for combat roles, and no true human female would be caught dead in a unit of constructs.
Kind of funny how much of the world building in this seems to be taking throwaway lines to their logical conclusion.
(‘You can’t be a folklift, because they aren’t that stupid, and I doubt there aren’t any accountants left.’)
all that and you didn’t give us a link to it?
(Nothing like the original cover…)
Published 1957.
“Terry Pratchett stated that he “can’t imagine a funnier terrorists’ handbook.” ”
This is the cover I remember: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/18/0a/78/180a7851dc63259ef56e018414c77adc.jpg
I’ve observed over the years that the more dedicated one is to The Cause, whatever the cause might be (political, religious, social, economic, all of the above), the more the sense of humor withers and dies. In contrast, people who are part of the cause and cherish it dearly can poke fun at it and joke about things while also being serious.
And yes, there is no humor in a Great And Serious Bureaucracy.
It’s great to see Dave’s post remembering and praising the late great sf writer Eric Frank Russell.
Russell is one of my favorite authors – and only because his novel The Great Explosion was one of the first works of fiction inducted (in 1985) into the Prometheus Hall of Fame for Best Classic Fiction.
If anyone’s curious, here’s a link to the Prometheus Blog essay-review appreciation of Russell’s satirical 1962 novel, an expansion of its 1951 short story “…And Then There Were None,” exploring the power of peaceful behavior and non-violence resistance to tyranny.
http://www.lfs.org/blog/non-violence-gandhian-resistance-and-myob-mind-your-own-business-against-earth-military-invasion-and-bureaucracy-in-an-interstellar-future-an-appreciation-of-eric-frank-russells-the-great/
P.S. Russell’s novel Wasp, meanwhile, was nominated for the Prometheus Hall of Fame many years ago. Perhaps it’s time for the LFS (www.lfs.org) to reconsider that Russell classic, too.
I remember And Then There Were None fondly from one of my dad’s SF anthologies 🙂
I meant to write “and NOT only”…
Bibliographic note. It’s easy, if you’re in the UK (or got UK editions) to identify Next of Kin, which is the title under which it was published in the UK.
In the US, the original novel was sent to Campbell at ASF — where it was too long to fit in a crowded schedule. So it got rewritten to a novelette, and retitled Plus-X. It was later sold to Wollheim for publication in an Ace Double — so it got expanded to the 40K words that one side of an Ace Double was allowed, and retitled The Space Willies. It wasn’t until several decades later that the full manuscript of Next of Kin was published in the US, as a Ballantine/DelRey edition that quickly went out of print.
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Bibliographic note. Next of Kin was the UK title, and the only one used there. For US readers, it was originally a novel, and submitted to Campbell at Astounding, who was overloaded with novels. So Russell shortened it to a novelette, and Campbell published it as Plus X. A few years later Russell sold it to Wollheim at Ace, for half an Ace Duble (which meant it could be expanded partially back, to 40K words) — it was retitled as The Space Willies. And a few decades later, it was published under the original title, expanded back to the original length, by Ballantine/Del Rey. So an American might have read it under one of three titles, at entirely different lengths.