Book review: "Noninterference" by Harry Turtledove,

"Noninterference" by Harry Turtledove is a science fiction novel first published in one volume in 1988,  although parts of it were previously published as short stories. It was also republished in 2004 ss part of the collection, "3xT."

Turtledove is best known for his "alternative history" stories but he has also written some science fiction which does not fall into that category and this is one of the novels which doesn't. The first part of the novel is set at least 1,200 years in our future, and the bulk of the novel is set 1,500 years after that.

In the novel, the survey service which explores the galaxy looking for other civilisations has a rule of "Noninterference" which exactly corresponds to the Federation Starfleet's "Prime Directive" in the Star Trek universe - a ban on interfering with the development of pre-spaceflight cultures, or even letting them know that space travellers exist.

The motives for the ban are benevolent, to prevent the exploitation of less-evolved societies and allow them to develop in their own ways.

Among Star Trek fans it is very much a cliche that Captain James T Kirk and other Federation officers seem to find an excuse to break the Prime Directive in almost every episode involving a pre-warp society. Similarly in tis book, a Survey Service anthropologist finds himself facing a moral dilemma about whether this rule is truly in the best interests of the people of Bilbeis IV, the world many, many light years from Earth which his ship is visiting.

The majority of the book is set fifteen hundred years later, which visitors from earth-human society and discover how much more enormous than anyone could have expected are the consequences of what David Ware had done ...

I strongly recommend this fascinating and extremely entertaining book.


It is available on Amazon at

Noninterference: Amazon.co.uk: Turtledove, Harry: 9780345343383: Books


 

     

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Vote Thrawn - the Chiss Alternative

Image
The Chiss race from the fictional Star Wars universe don't really do elections: their society is run by a family-based oligarchy.   But if the Chiss did do elections, Grand Admiral Thrawn's bid to lead the galaxy far, far away might have included a manifesto something like the one below. This post is a parody, not an election communication and no attempt to influence any real election on the planet Earth is intended. Fed up with a choice of galactic leaders between psychopathic Imperial mass murderers and utterly ineffective soggy-liberal New Republic wimps? Had enough of politicians who promise you a safe and secure society and then get your entire planet blown up - or even blow it up themselves? Sick to death with incompetent senators who wouldn't know a security threat if it was aiming a turbolaser at them from six feet away? There is an alternative - the Chiss alternative - vote for Admiral Thrawn! My name is Mitth'raw'nuruodo - former Senior Captain in the...
Read more

Book review - "Powerless" by Harry Turtledove

"Powerless" by Harry Turtledove is an alternative history novel set in a world dominated by the Soviet Union. The first two chapters of this full-length novel originally appeared in slightly different form in the September/October 2018 issue of " The magazine of Fantasy and Science Fictio n."  Greg Benford suggested to Harry Turtledove that he extended it into a novel and this is the result. Like the majority of Turtledove's alternative history novels, the story in this book operates on two levels. On the surface level, it is a work of fiction set on an alternative version of Earth. On a deeper level, it is an account of a real-world series of historical events told from an alternative perspective. The world of "Powerless" begins to diverge from our own with the Confederate States of America successfully winning independence in the 1860's. By the time in which the novel is set, many years later - and we are never told exactly how much later - the a...
Read more