Bio of a space tyrant Book

Hope & Spirit join the Navy
3 March 2012

This is the second of the Bio of a Space Tyrant series and has the protagonist, Hope Hubris, join the Jupiter Navy attempting to destroy the space pirates that haunt the Asteroid Belt. This is probably a logical follow on from the first book since in the first book he had been constantly raided by space pirates as he and his family attempted to flee the moons of Jupiter to find a better life on the planet. However it seems that as soon as he arrives on Jupiter he is suddenly enlisted in the navy and sent off to war.

I should make a few comments on the names, though I would hardly call Anthony a literary genius. As mentioned in the previous book Anthony attempts to use allegory in this series but just did not work. While Tolkien did not like allegory, thinking that it is a poor literary style in which to make a point, I myself believe that it is quite useful if used well. However it can be very difficult. The two books that stand in my mind that effectively use allegory would be Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels and C.S. Lewis' The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe. Here Anthony is attempting to use an inhabited solar system to allegorise the current political system of Earth (at the time of writing). Personally, I believed that he failed - it was simply too blatant. Lewis and Swift are subtle, but Anthony is as subtle as a baseball bat.

The main character, Hope Hubris, and his sister Spirit, sort of drag this out a bit more. Hope is the protagonist and Spirit is his loyal side kick (though the incident of incest between them in the first book was absolutely pathetic: why on Earth would Spirit have sex with her brother in the belief that he needed to have sex so that he might remain mentally healthy - this is another indication of Anthony's quite unbelievable attitudes on sex that seem to come out in all of his novels). However, the name of the protagonist is sort of a contradiction. In one sense his rise to become a tyrant is a symbol of hope, but his desire to take control for himself is in itself a sign of arrogance. While at first there is hope, as they say, power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely. If we consider many of the other tyrants who meteorically rose to power we always see this contradiction: in one sense there is hope for the subjects, but upon attaining power the tyrant becomes overwhelmed by hubris, a Ancient Greek term that refers to a stubborn arrogance that will inevitably result in the fall of the tyrant. The classic example from Greek literature is the Great King Xerxes as outlined in Herodotus' Histories.

It is also interesting that Anthony entitled this book mercenary when the entire time Hope is a member of the Jupiter Navy. It raises the question of whether the men and women in the modern armed forces are professional soldiers, or whether they are little more than glorified mercenaries. I guess the plot of the book, with Hope going out and clearing the Asteroid Belt of pirates, is an essence of this. While the navy is, in a sense, a legitimate occupation, the missions that they go on can be considered little more than mercenary adventures. However, taming the asteroid belt, in much the same way as Agrippa went out to clear the Mediterranean of pirates, is not so much a mercenary action but more of a police action.

The concept of a professional soldier as a mercenary takes me to a statement made by Smedley Butler in the 1930s. Butler was a career soldier in the American Army, and at the depths of the depression the central bankers in the United States attempted to overthrow Roosevelt's government with the intention of installing Butler as a military dictator. However Butler ratted them out, but that is not so much the point, but rather a comment that he made in reference to Al Capone (I assume we all know who he is). He said that Al Capone is a gangster that operates in three city districts, while the US Marines are little more than a mercenary force that operates on three continents.

Throughout his military career Butler spent a lot of time fighting to secure American business interests. Remember, this was during the 1920s and 30s when we do not even think about American adventures abroad. We believe that the US army fought in Europe during World War I, and also entered World War II in 1941, however we seem to think that they never left the country in the intervening 25 years. According to Butler this was not the case. While the army was not necessarily deployed in force outside of the United States during that time, they were still sent out on missions (usually the Marines) to protect American business interests, usually in Latin America. This was known as the Munroe Doctrine, where it was decreed that the American Sphere of influence was the Western Hemisphere and anybody else who dared to attempt to interfere would risk war with America. I guess this was the idea that Anthony was trying to raise, however I do not think he did all that well in doing so.