The Psychotechnic League Book

A patch it book of sorts from Poul Anderson, which posits an alternate history (actually, it predicted a history far direr than anything that came to pass, so a foreword by Sandra Miesel retconned a short intro to make it an alt-history) wherein a race of highly trained superman attempt to raise humanity out of the insane quagmire that was apparent to all post-WWII.

It's the training that makes them supermen, mind you, which was a common sci-fi trope of the day apparently inspired by General Semantics.

Anderson was a fine writer, of course, even in his early days, though the startling naivete of the worldview feels ironic in his early stories. Here we have a race of highly trained people whose plan is to manipulate world history to prevent a third world war'the inevitable war that was to be humanity's last hurrah, and as real a thing to most people who lived between 1946 and 1991'at all costs.

It's full of knowing ends-justifying-the-means and its most fantastic'though again, common'concept is that the U.N. would be the savior of man from the evils of nationalism. Because if a national totalitarian government is bad, an international one can only be better, right?

Well, certainly by the time the stories are over, Anderson's point-of-view has changed. He even has an epilogue where he confesses that he stopped writing the stories, which he had well mapped out, partly for their really poor predictiveness but also because it was obvious to all that the U.N. was no savior.

Still, not a bad read for what it is, and as he points out, we shouldn't let reality interfere with our enjoyment of stories.