Polymath

(Here's an old review of mine ...)


© 1974 by John Brunner


I was very excited to begin reading John Brunner’s Polymath. I’d started reading Stand on Zanzibar and was so impressed I found myself overwhelmed and could not get past the first twenty-or-so pages. Polymath seemed more accessible, shorter in length, more restrained in story, and I hoped to be wowed by the Nebula Award winner.

Well, what analogy best applies here? The caterpillar transformation to the butterfly? Or the myth of Sisyphus? I suppose that really depends on whether the payoff in the story actually pays off. To me, it did, but I can understand if other fans of good SF finish the novel wondering what exactly was the point.

Because Polymath is not good SF. It’s a good castaway story, a good survivalist story. One that tries to examine whether a Christ-like Platonic philosopher-king, still nascent in his powers, can rise up and save stranded men and women before their inner savage rises up and finishes them off. Sure, there are elements of a futuristic society, rockets, energy guns, and a new, albeit unnamed, planet, but Brunner could have set the novel in 18th century maritime England and replaced rockets with schooners, energy guns with muskets, the unnamed planet with the deserted South Seas island. The message would be the same.

This is not to say there’s nothing of interest in Polymath from an SF point of view. The colonial star Zarathustra (a great choice of name) goes nova, leaving those cities opposite the “sun-baked side” of the home planet scrambling to put as many rockets with survivors off-world as possible. Ships are thrown out of the system in every direction. Two happen to crash on the new world, with its convenient O2 atmosphere, when their suffocating crew and passengers are but mere hours from death.

The story opens a year and a half after the crash landing. A brutal year-long winter has pared a good portion of the survivors down to 800 or so. One ship is two-thirds under water, sinking in the ocean mud, and a salvage attempt is being made. Brunner does a very good job bringing an alien ecosystem and the lethal dangers it presents to man to life. Less successful are the social frictions that lead to a regression to the primitive state he describes the castaways undergoing.

Many of the characters are caricatures, boring and mostly one-dimensional. The eponymous polymath is not named until halfway through the novel, and I found this character uninvolving. In fact, the only character that had a spark was “Doctor Jerode,” a cantankerous and slightly-cliched country doctor straight out of a Heinlein teenage novel.

After the brief episode of the failed salvage attempt, the book settles down into its main storyline: the eventual triumph of the polymath and the conflict between the first group of castaways with those from the second ship. That group, led by the Eeevil Captain Gomes, have fully descended, in eighteen short months, into a barbaric dictatorship fueled solely by a slave economy.

However, the ending redeems the story in a completely unexpected way, raising the novel’s overall grade two whole points to B-minus. First contact between the two parties does not go well; in fact, the mental trickery inflicted by the polymath results in an armed invasion by Gomes and his men. Rather than continuing such genius to defeat the invaders, which I expected, or even an armed resistance, which is what the Hollywood dumbed-down version of the novel would portray, Brunner’s polymath takes an unanticipated course of action: a literal implementation of the teaching of Jesus. What happens, then, ultimately, is obvious, but how it unfolds not as much.

I would have liked to see the novel more fleshed-out, the characters breathed to life, and a valid reason for placing the story in the distant future. But any polymath, whether philosopher-king or gentle messiah, remains a figure of intense interest in our world. Brunner only scratches the surface.