The Trouble With Aliens - A Review

Anvil, Christopher. The Trouble With Aliens. Edited by Eric Flint. Riverdale, NY: Baen Books, 2006. 440 pages. $24.00

Half of the eighteen stories in this collection are in a section entitled War with the Outs. As the sequence of stories begins, the Outs are winning the war. They don’t have better technology, more weaponry, or more skillful generals – the secret is that they have a secret agent at the heart of Earth’s defenses. This agent has mental powers that enable him to persuade Earth’s leaders to adopt self-defeating strategies. He is, in fact, so clever, so insidious, that the only way to stop him is through an act of massive self-sacrifice.

I don’t know that Anvil intended to make the Secretary of Defense in “The Prisoner” a Christ figure, but his final action is at least comparable to that of Samson. He sacrifices himself and the entire central government to be sure of eliminating the traitor within. Once that key act of redemption has occurred, the remaining stories in the cycle chronicle the slow but steady human success in defeating the Outs.

What I find particularly interesting about this story, and the more general theme of the traitors within, is that most of these stories were written in the late 1950s, the days of Sputnik and the “missile gap,” in which right-wing groups were more concerned about putative enemies within than the actual Soviet enemy without. Ah, the halcyon days of Senator McCarthy (Joe, not Gene), and the John Birch Society’s references to Eisenhower as a Communist agent!
Christopher Anvil’s work was influenced by the Cold War. His is, of course, the conservative, rather than the liberal reaction to a lack of success: It can’t be our own missteps; there must be a traitor among us. (Not that liberals are immune to that sort of thinking, but in my lifetime this sort of leap has been characteristic of the hard right.) Not only is it necessary to weed out the enemy within, but taking out the entire central government along the way will only strengthen us. Meanwhile, the men on the front lines seem to be immune to such evil influences. Steadfast and true, they need only to be given a free hand and a decent amount of support in order to defeat any enemy, no matter how strong.

There are some very strong stories in the War with the Outs group. “Cargo for Colony 6” is a very well-written story about mental powers and our problems with dealing with things we don’t understand. “Foghead” is very entertaining. “The Ghost Fleet” reminded me of some real technology I encountered in the early 1990s – the ability to project illusory vessels to impress the enemy with an exaggerated sense of your strength. One of these stories, “Of Enemies and Allies,” is published for the first time in this collection.

The second group of stories, Beware of Aliens Bearing Gifts, isn’t just about Trojan Horses. It’s actually about our the dangers in believing in the free lunch, in some that’s too good to be true, in the kindness of strangers. As such, especially in “The Kindly Invasion,” Anvil espouses a hearty dose of skepticism and a handy personal weapon as the correct reaction to altruistic offers. “Mission of Ignorance” returns to the theme that it is the mental, not the physical or technological powers, of aliens that are most dangerous to us.

The third section, The Uninvited, includes “Mind Partner,” another story about mental powers and illusions. The theme here is that it is our ability to see things as they are, not as others might wish them to appear to be, that preserves our independence. The “mind partner” seems kindly and well-intentioned, but his charms are addictive and, eventually, destructive.

The stories in The Trouble With Aliens stand up to those in the earlier collection Interplanetary Patrol II. I think they stand comparison with a lot of the science fiction published in the 1950s and 1960s. Do they stand up to the work of Robert A. Heinlein, James Blish, Jack Vance, and some of the other stars of the period? I’ll leave that to the reader to determine for him- or herself.