Fiction Book Review: Birth of Fire by Jerry Pournelle
Birth of Fire is a short read, it can easily be finished in an afternoon if one so desires. This is not a slight against Jerry Pournelle who has helped produce (alongside Larry Niven) such masterpieces of fiction such as Lucifer’s Hammer and The Mote in God’s Eye. Rather it is a good example of his ability to deliver a punchy and engaging story. Niven and Pournelle remain some of the most implicitly right-wing sci-fi authors out there. Reading Birth of Fire in todays climate was a breath of fresh air, proof that you can have implicitly political fiction that is actually good.
We must consider that for the general public the notion of Sci-Fi is encapsulated by the twin progressive behemoths of Star Trek and Star Wars. Space communism writ large. Disney’s dollar sign commitment has naturally helped further Star Wars descent into lunacy progressive fantasy land with every prog box being ticked.
Pournelle and others like him exist beyond this childish notion of space communism. Sci-Fi has always been the more progressive genre and whilst political leanings of authors do not preclude great books (Ian M Banks for example has written some excellent science fiction and he was a pretty awful leftist) a growing number of modern science fiction is poisoned at the well with GloboHomo politics being woven in.
Birth of Fire then is what happens when a prescient writer decides to inject a healthy dose of right wing paleoconservatism (with a dash of libertarian economics) into a battle for Mars. Pournelle is more like us than he realizes, it isn’t just the Gooberment who is the bad guy, oh no, it’s that they are sewed up with a hyper capitalist set of corporations out of control. Star Wars nerds get their fake evil Sith but Pournelle describes the space Amazon combined with a futuristic IRS. It’s fun and fast paced stuff, our protagonist quickly finds himself embroiled in a fight for Mars independence. As with all Pournelle/Niven stuff there is a lot hidden in the details - this makes it that much more immersive, although it’s clear Niven has the world building down a tad better.
Many critics claim art/fiction should be apolitical. Indeed how we judge good or bad art should rest on things above politics (beauty) but reality has a way of breaking in. Consider these few quotes from the opening pages, keep in mind Pournelle wrote this in 1980.
Our protagonist discussing his limited education options
“Worse yet, we didn’t belong to any minority groups, and we weren’t quite poor enough for nondiscriminatory government aid. We sure weren’t rich enough for me to go to a good college without assistance.”
Continued description of the Earth government
“The government didn’t let you do that. The government took care of you, whether you wanted to be taken care of or not. Even the dropout communes were visited by the government social workers. But if they didn’t let you starve, they didn’t let you get ahead either. That’s called social justice.”
Lastly discussing the prisoners shipped to Mars:
“We were all white North Americans. The Federation goes through phases in its politics, and just then there was a lot of pressure not to ship blacks to Mars because it was cruel and unusual punishment”
It’s on the nose stuff to read this today in 2021. But that is what good artists and writers do. They perceive things that are not clear to the masses. It’s easy for the mediocre SciFi writer to prattle on about free love and globohomo because that is what they want and see happening around them today. They just write it up on steroids. A rarer gift is like Pournelles, they really see reality and what is going on and craft believable, and enjoyable fiction around it, even set in the far future of Mars colonization.
