Pandora’s Planet
Christopher Anvil
192 pages
published in 1972 (original in 1956)
Libertarianism has a well deserved bad reputation in science fiction, largely because so many writers who profess to be adherents also are godawful people who write jack off fantasies about how freedom requires there jackbooted thugs putting their boot in somebody else’s face, whether it’s Heinlein’s repeated wish to kill off all the lawyers or Kratman resurrecting the Waffen SS to deal with an alien invasion. But once upon a time there was a gentler, more humane sort of libertarianism, one that still catered to the prejudices of Analog notorious editor John Campbell Jr, but that hadn’t quite lost its humanity. H. Beam Piper was its best known representative, but there were others, like Christopher Anvil.
Anvil is one of those writers I only ever had heard about, but had never read simply because I’d never seen any of his work for sale, new or secondhand. He was never translated in Dutch as far as I know, one of those minor Analog writers who’d been reasonably popular in the sixties and seventies but was passed by when the genre moved on. From what I gather he specialised in stories in which clever humans put one over militaristic aliens and Pandora’s Planet is in that mold, gently cocking a snoot at authority in general in the process. It’s gentle and not very humourous satire, but much better than the modern libertarian habit of genociding every alien race that looks at Earth funny.
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