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The Super Barbarians (1962)

por John Brunner

Otros autores: Ver la sección otros autores.

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851314,699 (3.13)5
The Acre was the only part of an entire world where Earthmen were allowed to live as they pleased and as they were accustomed. For elsewhere on Quallavarra, humanity was forced into servitude by the Vorra, THE SUPER BARBARIANS, who has somehow managed to conquer space. But within the Acre, the underling Terrestrials had cooked up a neat method of keeping teir conquerors from stamping them out altogether. They had uncovered a diabolical Earth secret the Vorra couldn't abide - and yet couldn't do without.… (más)
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review of
John Brunner's The Super Barbarians
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - August 2, 2014

I'm trying to alternate here between reading & reviewing bks that have deep personal significance for me &/or substantial content to be addressed carefully AND SF, mostly John Brunner bks. The Brunner's are always a relief, they're fun but not throwaways. I have a bag of Brunners in my bedrm & I'm gradually making my way thru the bag. It won't be long now before I've read them & I'll have to start picking from other pleasure reading possibilities.

The Super Barbarians is a sortof Poetic Justice bk, a bk about invading barbarians digging their own grave - w/ a little help from those conquered. Alas, in 'real' life, the 'barbarians' might not be so 'easy' to get out of the way.

The Earthling protagonist is on the home planet of the conquerors as a well-pd servant. Regardless of the perqs of the job he's still a 2nd-class citizen (or not a citizen at all): "There were only four other passengers aboard—two unprosperous-looking private individuals and two retainers wearing the arms of the House of Shugurra, a cleft skull on a black ground. They were all Vorrish; accordingly I took the rearmost seat as befitted an Earthman." (pp 10-11)

The reader learns that the Earthlings lost the war against the Vorrish even tho 'it cd be worse':

"All kinds of subtle things reminded us of our defeat. For instance, we ourselves now called that engagement the Battle of Fourth Orbit instead of its original Earthly title, the Battle of the Martian Sphere. The Vorrish, naturally, referred to the Solar planets by numbers, not names." - p 12

But Earthmen have managed to have special status in relation to other subjugated worlds, even tho defeated:

"Earth was the only one which had had to be reduced by all the houses working in unison. This was another point they bore in mind when thinking of us.

"And that was why Earthmen were the only subject race of the Vorra permitted to walk occasionally on the surface of Qallavarra. That was why there was an Acre of Earth and not an Acre of any other planet." - p 18

What really made this bk fun for me was a particular plot element that I don't want to spoil but still want to refer to. SO, I'll quote the following & put a blank where the 'punchline' is. I'll leave it to yr imagination:

""As for you, Shaw!" Pwill resumed. "If I thought you'd been at all responsible for what's happened, I'd have had you gutted and spitted on pikes long ago. But since my son tells me you didn't, I'll accept that. I think he's still capable of telling the truth occasionally. I think!" He threw a venomous scowl at his heir, who returned it with interest.

""What do you know about—?" he continued, and stopped short, as though a word were on the tip of his tongue and he could not complete it. Llaq closed her hands on the arms of her chair and hissed between her teeth.

""______!" Pwill finished, catching the hint his wife threw him." - p 51

[LET IT BE HEREBY ANNOUNCED THAT I MIGHT START USING THIS BLANK TECHNIQUE MORE OFTEN IN FUTURE REVIEWS - THIS BEING THE 1ST REVIEW TO DO SO]

"I turned the paper over, and began to understand. The other side bore what the uneducated among the Vorra might very well take for a magical symbol of some kind—especially if they had been suitably primed beforehand by some of Kramer's mumbo-jumbo." - p 58

As I've often fantasized before, what if things like Voodoo sigils were actually circuit diagrams or some other sort of scientific symbol for wch the science has been lost? Of course, some Voodoo practitioners might claim that the science isn't lost, that the science is Voodoo. What "might very well [be] take[n] for a magical symbol" in the preceding quote is actually a molecular diagram.

Philip K. Dick enthusiasts may find some slight plot similarity between this (1962) & Dick's "We Can Remember It for you Wholesale" (1966) - although Dick's story is more twisted. "That, though, was surely a bonus. What mattered was the regaining of my lost knowledge. i could even recall how it was lost. I had been compelled to hide it from myself." (p 108)

Once the chaos of war's unleashed how many disasters have happened just as a result of misunderstandings & 'friendly fire'?:

"The first direct attack on the House of Shugurra was not made by the House of Pwill at all, it was discovered later. A detachment commander of one of the allied lesser houses wanted to silence a gun-post enfilading some ground he needed to move his men across. He had only a mortar capable of reaching the gun-post, and the mortar was not wholly accurate. Still, he set it up behind a small hillock and let fly. The bomb dropped fair on the huge glass dome crowning the house, and fell through before exploding and killing over a thousand noncombatants—women, children and sick old men—gathered there from outlying buildings.

"Mad with rage, and still thinking, thanks to inadequate intelligence reports, that only the House of Pwill was ranged against him, Shugurra Himself ordered retaliation." - p 145

"From then on the Vorra were content to fight anyone and everyone they could find. That was the way they were." - p 146

It seems to me that the reason why blacks replaced Irish & other criminalized British subjects as slaves in the early days of what became the USA is b/c they were easier to subjugate b/c of their recognizability. Sometimes I think the USA military picks on Asians & Arabs for much the same reason. ( )
  tENTATIVELY | Apr 3, 2022 |
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The Acre was the only part of an entire world where Earthmen were allowed to live as they pleased and as they were accustomed. For elsewhere on Quallavarra, humanity was forced into servitude by the Vorra, THE SUPER BARBARIANS, who has somehow managed to conquer space. But within the Acre, the underling Terrestrials had cooked up a neat method of keeping teir conquerors from stamping them out altogether. They had uncovered a diabolical Earth secret the Vorra couldn't abide - and yet couldn't do without.

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